Posted by the ghetto intellectual on 2/22/2010Dig it!From Beecher004 (comment section of Boston Globe):This article says a lot about how Haiti's slave economy helped us in our fight for freedom in the 18th century, but it barely hints at the way the US slave economy stifled Haitian freedom. The key fact is that, as the article says:
"in 1806, the Jefferson administration succeeded in a ban on all trade with the newly independent nation of Haiti, extinguishing its hopes for prosperity, at the beginning of its new history."
Despite the best efforts of honorable new englanders like our heroic Senator Sumner, Haiti has been far more damaged by US policy than helped. How Haiti Saved America
Two centuries ago, a glittering Caribbean Island helped finance the Revolution
By Ted Widmer | March 21, 2010
The United States has been leading the response to the Haitian earthquake for all of the reasons that we would expect: our geographical proximity, our competence at emergency response, and our innate generosity. That fits the narrative most of us hold in our heads, for we typically think of Haiti and America as a basket case and a basket, joined only by their contradictions, and the beneficence of one to the other.
On the surface, that is true enough. Haiti was desperately poor well before this latest catastrophe and routinely faces problems that border on the biblical — floods, epidemics, and a deforested landscape that suggests a plague of locusts (sadly, it was just human beings). The United States is the world’s all-time winner, whether defined by Olympic medal count or GDP or any other national sweepstakes.
Yet a closer look at the early history of the United States and Haiti — proudly, the two oldest countries in this hemisphere — suggests that the relationship was once very different. In fact, it was the island’s wealth that turned heads in those days. And the United States was hardly a foregone conclusion. In the darkest days of the American Revolution, when it seemed preposterous to believe that the mighty British empire might allow 13 rogue colonies to come into existence as a new nation, the support that came from a 14th colony — French Saint Domingue, Haiti’s predecessor — made an important difference.
In recent years, the bestseller lists have been dominated by history books arguing that our founding moment is the key to understanding everything that has happened since. That is all well and good — in fact, it’s great news that so many Americans are willing and even eager to read about the 18th century. But to tell the story right, we need to think about all of the people who worked for our independence. In the appeals for aid that have gone out over the last few months, there is one powerful reason for aiding Haiti that has never been articulated. Simply put — the United States might never have come into existence without the help of our island neighbor.
That is a counterintuitive thought, to put it mildly. But to avoid defeat, Americans needed guns and powder and bullets and warm clothing. To buy those necessities, they needed money. And money in those days came from France, eager to twist the tail of the British Lion. France supported America for many reasons, including the ones we learn in school — Benjamin Franklin’s
roguish charm and the appeal of the underdog and England’s comeuppance. But a reason we hear less often is that France had a vested interest in protecting a lucrative overseas possession with a strong connection to the United States, and to New England in particular.
Here in Boston, where the American Revolution is an everyday fact, it helps to pull the camera back, away from this tiny peninsula, and consider the broader hemisphere. In the late 18th century, the situation was very nearly reversed — Haiti’s predecessor, Saint Domingue, was the richest colony in the world. Its capital city, Cap Français (today’s Cap Haïtien) was larger than Boston, and among the most cosmopolitan places in the Americas. Its culture matched anything in New York, Havana, Philadelphia, or the dour Puritan city jutting into Massachusetts Bay.
Early in the century, Benjamin Franklin had learned that modest displays of wit were punishable by jail in Boston — why he soon found it convenient to flee to Philadelphia. In Saint Domingue, by contrast, wit was everything. Comedies were performed at playhouses around the country (the largest theater in Cap Français seated 1,500). Le Cap’s first theater preceded Boston’s by more than 50 years. The historian James E. McClellan III said that Haiti’s scientific clubs “certainly rivaled, if they did not eclipse” those of Philadelphia and Boston. A highly sophisticated urban life sprang into existence — more than 11 towns had more than 1,000 people, and in the capital, all of Cap Français danced to orchestras, laughed at cabarets, played at cards and billiards, and visited wax museums. (In 1789, a waxen George Washington was put on display, in what might have passed for the first state visit by a US president.)
As these accounts would suggest, a great deal of money was made in Saint Domingue. To be “as rich as a Creole” was a familiar boast in Paris, and a substantial portion of the French economy depended on this one distant settlement. This was the jewel of the French empire, furnishing the coffee drunk in Paris, the sugar needed to sweeten it, and the cotton and indigo worn by men and women of fashion. Saint Domingue’s commerce added up to more than a third of France’s foreign trade. One person in eight in France earned a living that stemmed from it. By 1776, this tiny colony produced more income than the entire Spanish empire in the Americas.
But Haiti’s superheated economy required constant, grinding labor in the plantations — and that meant massive importation of human beings from Africa. To a greater degree than in South Carolina or Virginia, the planters of Saint Domingue worked their slaves to death. This was a slave society on a scale beyond anything seen in North America. The profits were bigger, and so were the cruelties, distributed as generously. A small colony of 10,000 square miles — roughly the size of Massachusetts — held a teeming population of Africans, half a million strong, ruled over by a mixture of French families, light-skinned mulattoes, and the profiteering adventurers who always congregate in lively Caribbean cities.
To a surprising degree, Boston was economically linked with a city that was in many ways its polar opposite. New England merchants had been getting rich in Hispaniola since at least 1684, when a young adventurer, William Phips, found a Spanish treasure that made his fortune there. Foodstuffs like dried fish were sold by enterprising Yankees to the rich French island, and the trade in molasses (a run-off of the sugar refining process) became a New England specialty, part of the so-called Triangle Trade. The difficulty of regulating this trade led to the strictures by which England tried and generally failed to bring New England to heel, enraging Americans in the process.
So, well before the first shots were fired at Lexington Green, New Englanders had a mutually beneficial relationship with Saint Domingue that was irritating to England. And France was highly protective of Saint Domingue, which the English had tried on several occasions to seize. All of this provided essential background to the key fact — the French alliance — that allowed the United States to lurch into existence.
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tags: haiti, civil war, reparations, the United States, france,
