John Adams, Slavery, and Race: Ideas, Politics, and Diplomacy in an Age of Crisis by Arthur Scherr

Author:Arthur Scherr
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The previous chapters have attempted to broaden our knowledge of U.S. diplomacy with Haiti during Adams’s administration and its attitude toward slavery during the Haitian Republic’s birth pangs. Among other things, historians have been less than successful in disentangling the saga of Higginson, the Adams administration, and Louverture. This scholarly lapse may have occurred because those familiar with the complex events of the Haitian Revolution are insufficiently conversant with U.S. foreign policy and the Quasi-War with France, and vice versa.64

The United States did not legally permit exports of weapons, or indeed trade of any kind, with France and its colonies for most of Adams’s presidency. The administration’s inner workings and cabinet decision making indicate that Federalist leaders’ pro-British sentiments (although not those of Adams himself) led them to contemplate an alliance with Britain against Louverture to preserve Anglo-American harmony, including the survival of slavery. Consul General Stevens was less devoted than his superiors to placating the British at the Haitians’ expense. On the contrary, he, his partner James Yard, and Stephen Higginson seemed intent on profiting from trade with Haiti, including the illegal shipment of weapons to the black regime.

Although Adams was ready to accept Haitian independence as a fait accompli and preferred Louverture to the more radical Rigaud, he refused to strengthen the “Black Napoleon” or encourage his tendencies toward independence by permitting him to purchase frigates or weapons. Adams doubted that he would promote the national interest by helping to create a powerful black neighbor, whose rousing slogan “Death or Liberty!” might one day be screamed by hundreds of thousands of slaves following Haiti’s example in a devastating war of liberation in the American South.

Embattled Secretary of State Pickering’s Haitian policy primarily sought to fulfill his concept of the national interest—to destroy the Democratic-Republican Party, advance U.S. trade, and blunt the French Revolution’s force in the Western Hemisphere. Unlike his close friend Higginson, he was not motivated by personal economic self-interest. Rather, he was an embittered conservative appalled by the worldwide storm of revolution, and trying to devise ways to master the tumult or turn it against itself.

Historians have nonetheless accepted the myth that Adams and Pickering were untiring supporters of the Haitian Revolution, incorporating into this interpretation the view that the administration provided stores of weaponry to the Haitian rebels. Curiously, none of the many histories of the period mentions that from 1797 to 1800, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed and renewed a general embargo on the exportation of armaments with no consideration of Louverture’s needs. Scholars’ recent tendency to ascribe antislavery zeal and philanthropy to the Federalists’ limited support for Louverture complements their denigration of Jefferson in the latest historiography of the Early Republic. They exaggerate Adams’s support for Louverture, which primarily consisted in choosing him over his rival Rigaud during the “quasi-war” with France.

Seeking to appeal to a conservative reading public, and perhaps voicing their own conservative socioeconomic ideologies topped off with a “politically correct” veneer, over the years most U.S. historians’ preferences have shifted from the “aristocratic democrat” Jefferson to “Honest John Adams.

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