A Disease in the Public Mind (13 page)

A delighted Dessalines, who could not read or write, ordered Boisrond-Tonnerre to compose the declaration. “Make people know how I feel about the whites!” he said. He had long since made that clear by his merciless conduct on the battlefield. To underscore the new nation's policy, he picked up a French tricolor and cut the white strip out of it, creating a new national flag.

On January 1, 1804, a huge celebration took place at Toussaint Louverture's old stronghold, the inland town of Gonaives. After a day of feasting and dancing, General Dessalines mounted a platform draped in the new flags, and with a wave of his hand he silenced the pounding kettledrums and trumpets. The short stocky general proclaimed the island independent of France and declared it would henceforth be known by its Carib Indian name, Haiti. Then he summoned Boisrond-Tonnerre to read the Declaration of Independence.

It began with a war cry. “We must live free or we must die!” A paragraph exhorted the listeners to “look about you for your wives, husbands, brothers, sisters. Where have they gone? They have fallen prey to these vultures” (the whites). The rest of the document was a raging denunciation of France and French whites.

The mere news of this declaration inspired not a few Frenchmen to charter ships to send their families and moveable property elsewhere. But when they arrived at various ports to embark, armed soldiers blocked their paths and ordered them to return to their homes.

General Dessalines had decided Haiti must be cleansed of everyone white. On March 9 he marched into the port of Jeremie and dragged every white male in the city into the town square. Dessalines gazed contemptuously at them and snarled: “You whites of Jeremie—I know how you hate me . . . The blood of you all shall pay!”

Five doctors, an American visitor, and a few foreign merchants were shoved to the other side of the square. Next Dessalines offered amnesty to about four hundred men of property if they would pay substantial ransoms before sundown. The rest were hacked to death by ax-wielding executioners. The four hundred reprieved men paid their ransoms well before sundown. But they were not released. During the night, they were all beheaded and their bodies left in a huge pile.

Dessalines marched to other cities and repeated this gruesome performance. Some of his generals, such as Jean Christophe, tried to dissuade him. They had become friendly with many of these doomed Frenchmen. They needed their help to restore Haiti's prosperity. But the new ruler was implacable. French men, women, and children died in the same merciless way.

In one or two ports, Dessalines's more compassionate lieutenants allowed some Frenchmen and their families to escape to nearby ships. A few foreign merchants used bribes and persuasion to help others flee. One Scottish merchant from Baltimore was later given a gold medal by French refugees in that city to express their gratitude.

Dessalines closed his campaign with a masterful final act of treachery. He issued a proclamation, calling on whites who had remained in hiding to emerge, guaranteeing them safe conduct to departing ships. A few dozen took him at his word—and met instant death from the waiting ax-men.
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It is not hard to imagine what President Thomas Jefferson thought and felt when the story of the extermination of Haiti's whites reached Washington, DC, and other American cities in the spring of 1804. Instead of a prosperous multiracial nation under Toussaint Louverture, Jefferson had helped to create a wrecked and desolated island in the grip of an illiterate, half-mad despot. Haiti's blood-soaked birth made the ultimate meaning of the term
race war
an unforgettable nightmare. It was soon on its way to becoming a disease of the public mind in the southern states.

The horrified president could think of only one solution: Haiti had to be as isolated as possible from the United States of America. A few months
after Dessalines had completed his slaughter, Jefferson's son-in-law, Congressman John W. Eppes, rose in the House of Representatives to introduce a resolution, calling on the United States to refuse to recognize Haiti's independence. Henceforth Americans would have no further political contact with the Republic of Haiti. Everyone knew this was a message from the president. It passed overwhelmingly.
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Why did President Jefferson manage to escape without a word of reproach or criticism, both in the North and the South, for the awful fate he had helped to visit on Haiti? Few people besides James Madison knew about the president's approval of Napoleon's invasion. The public blame fell on France.

Even if the whole truth were known, there is another reason why most Americans would probably have found little fault with the president: the Louisiana Purchase. This diplomatic triumph had opened virtually endless acres of fertile western land to the nation's farmers and would-be farmers. The acquisition guaranteed Thomas Jefferson's popularity for decades to come. In 1804, he was reelected by an overwhelming majority. His Federalist opponent carried only two states.

But in Thomas Jefferson's troubled soul, the nightmare generated by Haiti never went away. On the contrary, it redoubled his fear that the problem of slavery in the South was insoluble and would eventually destroy the United States of America, either in a race war or in a civil war between North and South.

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A few months after General Dessalines ended his blood-soaked final campaign, he wrote a letter to President Jefferson, expressing the hope that an independent Haiti could establish diplomatic relations with the United States. Here was a moment that might have altered Haiti's tragic future.

The letter revealed that Dessalines's rage did not extend to all white men. It was the treacherous French whom he had hated and punished. He
had conspicuously spared American lives in his final rampage. The dictator and his advisors were remembering the friendly relationship that Toussaint Louverture had enjoyed with America during President John Adams's administration.

For President Jefferson, the letter posed a stark political danger. It could lead to the exposure of his initial encouragement of the French attempt to reconquer Haiti and reimpose slavery. Jefferson never answered Dessalines. Haiti was cut adrift to reel through decades of instability and demoralizing poverty.

Other nations treated Haiti even more deplorably. Before resuming diplomatic and commercial relations, the French insisted on a huge indemnity for property destroyed or seized in the upheavals of the 1790s. Nevertheless, America's chance to alter Haiti's history—and perhaps eliminate the South's dread of a race war—was lost forever. President Thomas Jefferson's silence is one of those hidden turning points that leave historians brooding over what might have been.

CHAPTER 7

New England Preaches—and Almost Practices—Secession

While average citizens welcomed the Louisiana Purchase with enthusiasm and began voting for Thomas Jefferson and his Republican Party (often called “Democratic-Republican” by modern historians), the leaders of the defeated Federalist Party remained unreconciled. In Boston's
Columbian Centinel
, a Federalist spokesman voiced an angry fear of the future. “This unexplored empire, of the size of four or five European kingdoms,” would destroy the balance of the Union. Louisiana was currently “a great waste, unpeopled with any beings besides wolves and wandering Indians.” But in coming years it would be divided into states, all of whom would follow Virginia's political leadership.
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When the treaty approving the purchase was submitted to Congress, Federalist representative Roger Griswold of Connecticut declared the Constitution had no provision for acquiring new territory, and Louisiana would have to be governed as a colony, the way the British ruled Jamaica. Senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, who had been secretary of state under President John Adams, went even further. He asserted Jefferson would need
the unanimous approval of every state in the Union to sign the treaty. Senator John Breckinridge of the new state of Kentucky replied that if Congress rejected the treaty, Kentucky and Tennessee would secede from the Union and form a separate country.
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The Jeffersonians ignored the Federalists and the treaty was approved, thanks to the majorities they commanded in both houses of Congress. But the Federalists, led by Senator Pickering and former Congressman Fisher Ames, the party's leader in Massachusetts, continued to condemn the purchase of Louisiana. They predicted the prospect of cheap land would depopulate the East and lure badly needed workers from the new factories that were opening in New England. The only solution, as Ames saw it, was for the Federalists “to entrench themselves in the state governments and endeavor to make state justice and state power a shelter of the wise, the good and the rich from the wild destroying rage of the Southern Jacobins.”

Pickering went further than Ames. He decided New England, and hopefully neighboring New York, to which thousands of New Englanders were emigrating, should secede from the Union, form a new country, and seek the protection and alliance of Great Britain to defend them against the Jacobinic Jeffersonians. He conferred with Vice President Aaron Burr, who had quarreled with the president and was unlikely to be on the ticket when Jefferson ran for reelection in 1804. Burr, a New Englander by blood, agreed to run for governor of New York with Federalist support. If he won, he would lead New York into the new nation.

The conspiracy again revealed the intensity of New England's conviction that they were the predestined leaders of an independent America. Their defiance of George III and his Parliament had triggered the American Revolution. Hadn't John Adams, the “Atlas of Independence” in the Continental Congress, selected George Washington to lead the army and Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence? The Pilgrim fathers had seen Plymouth as “one small candle . . . [that] hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation.” The Puritans who founded Boston had prophesied it would be a “city upon a hill watched by the world.” Now these arrogant Virginians were taking charge of the United States of America. It was intolerable!
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Here were the seeds of a primary disease of the public mind, which would soon fuse with antislavery to create a hatred of the South and Southerners, with tragic consequences for America's future.
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Nothing came of Senator Pickering's plot. Slandered and smeared with special savagery by the Jeffersonian Republicans as a traitor to the party, Burr lost his race for governor of New York. Jefferson's landslide reelection in 1804 soon swept the Republican Party into power in Massachusetts. But the seeds of discontent and suspicion of Virginia's leadership had been planted in many minds. These burst into dangerous bloom in Jefferson's second term, when he confronted the threat of war with Great Britain over London's arrogant interference with American overseas commerce. The British insisted their blockade of France and her European allies entitled them to seize American ships and kidnap American sailors into the Royal Navy. The French were equally ready to assault American ships trading with Britain. Instead of war, the president declared an embargo against trade with Britain, France, and the rest of the civilized world.

The embargo had a devastating impact on New England, home of most of America's million-ton merchant fleet. Tens of thousands of restless, angry seamen were left idle in her ports. In Newburyport, once the third busiest harbor in Massachusetts, seventy ships rocked and rotted at their anchors. Merchants went bankrupt everywhere. One critic raged that it was like “cutting a man's throat to cure a nosebleed.” In December 1808, on the first anniversary of the president's decree, down-at-the-heel sailors dragged a mastless ship along Newburyport's rundown streets, with a helmsman wearing a placard: “Which way shall I steer?”

Massachusetts Federalists used the embargo's distress to publish a warning: “A Separation of the States and its Consequences to New England.” Led by Senator Pickering (Fisher Ames had died), the Federalists regularly condemned President Jefferson's supposed partiality to France. When some infuriated New Englanders began smuggling exports and imports to and from Canada in defiance of the embargo, the president asked Congress to pass a force bill, empowering him to make war on them with the U.S. Army and Navy.

This policy only deepened New England's sense of alienation. Connecticut's legislature, in a special session, declared that the state had the power to reject both the embargo and the force bill as unconstitutional. The state had a duty “to interpose a protecting shield between the rights and liberties of the people and the assumed powers of the federal government.” A Vermont grand jury expressed outrage at the idea of the U.S. Army and local law officers enforcing the president's proclamation against trade with Canada. Rhode Island militiamen, called out by the governor, refused to arrest violators of the embargo. New England was giving the man who had said a state could nullify an act of Congress in 1798 (when the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts) a demoralizing taste of his own medicine.
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In the House of Representatives, Virginia's John Randolph, a Jefferson enemy, intoned that all of Europe—and most Americans—saw the United States as “a divided people, imbecile and distracted.” Aghast at the widespread disgust with the embargo, the Republicans repealed it on President Jefferson's last day in office. It had accomplished little or nothing. But the Republican Party, still buoyed by the Louisiana Purchase, remained potent at the polls, electing James Madison as Jefferson's successor.