The Uses of Vastey: Reading Black Sovereignty in the Atlantic Public Sphere

Abstract

By looking at largely contemporaneous nineteenth-century writing about Vastey from England, the United States, and France, this chapter examines how Baron de Vastey’s writings became the signs and symbols of the promises of black sovereignty in the Atlantic World. The author also shows the way in which Vastey’s ideas positively inflected international attitudes towards Haitian independence. By reading reviews of Vastey’s works, Daut argues, we can see how journalists, politicians, scientists, and abolitionists used Vastey’s writing to make the case for Haitian sovereignty.

In February 1817, Thomas Strafford returned to Kingston from the Kingdom of Hayti. Shortly therefeafter he would be accused before and would go on to be convicted by the county of Middlesex Assizes for having published “several wicked, scandalous, malicious, seditions and inflammatory libels” (“Strafford Indictment” 347). Strafford was originally from Kingston but according to the detailed record of indictment, which amounts to about thirty-eight pages in length, he had recently been living in northern Haiti. While in Cap-Henry, Strafford had evidently made the acquaintance of King Henry Christophe , who is referred to in the indictment as the “usurped, accursed […] person called Christopher to wit” (347–348). The allegations against Strafford had everything to do with his alleged connection to Christophe. The accused was charged with “being a malicious and ill disposed Person [who] unlawfully, wickedly, and maliciously devis[ed] and intend[ed] to aid further […] the said Christopher in such designs and endeavours to excite disaffection and insubordination […] amongst the Slaves of the said Island of Jamaica” (348). The defendant was, furthermore, accused of having attempted “to disquiet, molest, and destroy tranquility and the good order of the said Island of Jamaica in furtherance and aid of the said Person called Christophe” (348).

It is not surprising that a person returning from independent Haiti to a colony where slavery still reigned might be vulnerable to charges of sedition in connection with anti-slavery activity.¹ In the early nineteenth-century, Haiti stood simultaneously as the pinnacle of black sovereignty and the nightmare of postcolonial rule. What is surprising about this indictment is the particular evidence provided to uphold these charges and therefore to justify Strafford’s conviction.

What was this “wicked” document that Strafford had apparently so “maliciously” carried with him to Kingston , allegedly, with the goal of inciting slave rebellion? And what, if anything, did Haiti’s King Christophe have to do with it?

The “seditious” material in question was written by none other than Baron de Vastey . In perusing the pages of the indictment, we learn in overly verbose and repetitive prose that on 13 December 1816, Strafford “unlawfully quit” Haiti, “with the purpose of clandestinely landing in the said Island of Jamaica” (348). After having arrived in Kingston on 6 January 1817,²

the evil, dishonest Strafford did publish and cause to be published a most wicked, scandalous, seditious, and inflammatory libel of and concerning the condition of Slaves and of and concerning the existing state of Slavery, and of and concerning the conduct relation and Sentiments of white Persons towards Slaves, and of and concerning the insurrection and revolt in the said Part of the said Island of Saint Domingo, and which said wicked, scandalous, malicious, seditious, and inflammatory Libel is printed in the French language and purports to have been composed by the Descendant of an African called the Baron de Vastey […] and which said wicked, scandalous, malicious, sedition and inflammatory libel is entitled in the French language, “Reflexions [sic] sur les Noirs et les Blancs […]” […] meaning as these English words follow (that is to say) Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites. (348–349).

Strafford’s sentence for having published a copy or copies of Baron de Vastey’s Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères (1816) (whose subtitle contained the words “on the blacks, the whites, the civilization of Africa and the kingdom of Haiti”) was recorded as a fine of 500 pounds. Jail time was also mandated and Strafford was to “be and stand committed until such security be given” (384).

Almost the entire indictment, beginning on page 346 of the register and ending on page 384, is made up of handwritten passages copied from the original French of Vastey’s Réflexions, which appear alongside original translations into English.³ Although, it can hardly be considered a faithful rendition of the Haitian original, this Jamaican translation for the purposes of indictment is noteworthy, if only because it is entirely interventionist and inflected with the carceral aims of the court. Not only does the translator insert parenthetical asides into the middle of quoted passages (as above), but he often prefaces these translations with unequivocal judgment designed to stand as evidence for the charges at hand. The translator prefaces the following translation, for example, by noting that the passage contains “said wicked, scandalous, seditious, and inflammatory words” (354). Baron de Vastey is then quoted as having written of the logic behind the Haitian Revolution :

Wearied with so many crimes and offenses, we ran to Arms, we measured our strength with our exertions, we fought body to body, Man to Man, with stones, with iron […] to preserve our liberty, our existence, those of our Wives and Children:—After having spilt our Blood in Streams mixed with that of our Tyrants, we remained Masters of the field of Battle. Let Mazères (meaning the said Mazères),⁴ that ferocious and treacherous Colonist, who has been […] one of the instigators of the cruelties of all kinds which his Countrymen have exercised upon us, […] let him recollect how many Victims he has caused to be sacrificed or he has massacred with his own hands, then he will see if we have a right to that liberty and independence which we have conquered at the price of so much Blood […] I am far from wanting to dispute the right that other Nations have had to render themselves independent, but I dare affirm without fear of being contradicted that no people has had more right to liberty and independence than the people of Hayti. (364)

So, it was that the first English translation of Vastey’s Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères was commissioned solely in order to put Strafford in prison.

It will perhaps not be difficult for the modern reader to imagine what was perceived to be so dangerous and threatening to the colonial government in Jamaica about Vastey’s rather singular, and in some ways, exceptionally violent claim to sovereignty on Haiti’s behalf. Baron de Vastey was a black identified writer from a sovereign black state that sat in the middle of a decidedly non-sovereign Caribbean archipelago. This was a space controlled primarily by four white empires: Spain, France, England, and the Netherlands. The act of the self-identified descendant of an “African”⁵ defending the sovereignty of a (black) postcolonial nation was always going to be perceived by (white) colonial ruling powers as seditious, dangerous, and even malicious.⁶ Moreover, at the time Vastey published his Réflexions, Haitian independence had not been officially recognized by any other nation.

Haiti was not merely being passively ignored by the other world powers so much as it was being consciously disavowed, as colonial governments worked to actively “suppress certain memories of the Haitian Revolution” (Fischer 38). Early Haitian writers often tasked themselves with countering attempts at suppression by publishing performative memories of Haitian independence. Doris Garraway has written, to that end, “writing and crucially print were the indispensable means by which Haitians attempted to declare and make manifest Haitian sovereignty by publicly disseminating defenses of that sovereignty as so many textual speech acts” (“Print, Publics” 82). Vastey’s Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères , as merely one of these numerous “textual speech acts,” was as much a defense of Haiti’s sovereignty as it was the indisputable evidence. If Haitian sovereignty represented a continuation of the Haitian Revolution’s threat to the Atlantic World, (black) Haitian writing was the proof.

Reading Vastey’s words as deadly weapons is not entirely out of keeping with the Haitian baron’s own argumentative strategy. After all, he had made the argument that the Haitian print public sphere itself could rival the threat of violence that led to Haitian independence. Vastey wrote that he sought to prove to Mazères with his Réflexions, “morally and physically, with the pen and with the sword, that we are not inferior to their type” (RM 13).

Despite the indictment’s inflammatory characterization of Vastey’s defense of black humanity and Haitian sovereignty, the vast majority of contemporary Anglophone reviews of his writings were exceedingly positive. One laudatory example comes from Moses Thomas’s Philadelphia-based Analectic Magazine, which published praise for Vastey and the very same text that Strafford stood accused of having used to incite slave rebellion in Jamaica. The reviewer not only recognized Haitian sovereignty through Vastey’s book, but made the case that England, the United States, and the other world powers should do so formally, as well. Vastey’s writing, according to the review, “cannot but leave a favourable impression on the minds of our readers relative to… the state of the people in Hayti […] the most cogent arguments which his Majesty [of Haiti] could urge, in favour of such a recognition [of Haitian independence], would be, to present the other powers with a copy of le Baron de Vastey’s Reflections” (“Article V” 403).

The décalage is quite large between the interpretation of Vastey’s work, and by extension Haitian independence, in the Strafford indictment as “wicked” and “seditious,” and the interpretation of his work in the Analectic Magazine as the best argument for Haitian sovereignty. This difference can serve as the impetus for understanding how unofficial arguments for black sovereignty in the nineteenth-century Anglo-European world were channeled to a large extent through the official writings of Baron de Vastey. After publication of the first full length English translation of Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères in March of 1817, Vastey gained an international reputation in anti-slavery circles not only as the foremost defender of Haiti’s sovereignty, but as the foremost defender of (black) human rights. The same damning critiques of slavery, colonialism, and color prejudice that appeared threatening to colonial authorities in Jamaica helped to cement Vastey’s image as, in one nineteenth-century natural historian’s terms, “a practical demonstration of what the negro is capable of doing,” after having “gained and maintained their liberty by striking manfully with the sword” (Ewcorstart 272).

By looking at largely contemporaneous nineteenth-century writing from England, the United States, and France, I want to both make the case that Vastey’s books became the signs and symbols of the promises of black sovereignty in the Atlantic World and understand why they had such an important impact. To this end, I consider three early nineteenth-century readings of Vastey’s works performed by his British translator, the botanist William Hamilton ; the U.S. journalist and future Attorney General Caleb Cushing ; and the French anti-slavery historian, Antoine Métral , in order to document how Vastey’s ideas positively inflected international attitudes towards Haitian independence.

Although influence is notoriously difficult to measure, these three writers have been chosen because their reviews and judgments seem to have greatly contributed to the impact of Vastey’s work in the early nineteenth century. Their engagements with Vastey’s writings demonstrate how the case for Haitian sovereignty was mediated through several separate but related realms, including, literature, literacy, history, science, and the law. Following Hamilton’s translation of Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères , Vastey’s works became available for use not only by Anglophone abolitionist writers and activists but by natural historians, many of whom used Vastey’s words to both affirm Haitian sovereignty and to make arguments about the capacity for all black people to rule themselves without colonial intervention.

Judging by subsequent citations and references, the writings on Vastey by Hamilton, Cushing, and Métral , also provided crucial momentum for many other U.S., British, and more surprisingly, French authors, who were engaged in ardently urging their governments to formally recognize Haitian independence. Nineteenth-century reviews of Vastey’s writings also help us to see how his efforts to study the meaning and consequences of black identity became part of the same transatlantic Afro-diasporic network of translation and circulation that would claim Phillis Wheatley , Ignatius Sancho , and Olaudah Equiano as the primary signs and symbols of African literacy, and therefore, of African humanity.⁷ The major difference here, however, is that Vastey’s writings are not only made to stand as evidence for “African” literacy as humanity, but they represent the justification for Haitian, and by extension, black sovereignty.

One question I am also asking in this chapter is what accounts for these positive interpretations of Vastey’s writings as humanist, which so vastly diverge from the majority of those discussed in Chap. 2 where Vastey was painted as a propagandist? Beyond understanding varying critiques of his writing along the binaries of pro-slavery or abolitionist thought, colonialist or anti-colonialist arguments, how do we account for the same works being read and used in such directly conflicting ways by people whose ultimate goals might otherwise be largely aligned? These are crucial questions for the examination of Vastey’s role in the development of Black Atlantic humanism.

One of my contentions is that the nineteenth-century readings, whether they render his works as propagandist or as humanist,  have influenced twentieth-century and contemporary readings of Vastey’s work. I am particularly interested in what the practices of generous reading under study in this chapter, as opposed to the skeptical readings discussed in the previous chapter of this volume, teach us about understanding the legacy of Vastey’s works for the philosophical and material discourse of Black Atlantic humanism for which nineteenth-century Haiti was not merely the symbol but the argument.

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Science and Sovereignty

In Liverpool on 26 March 1817 there appeared in publication a formal, full-length English translation of Vastey’s Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères under the title, Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites […] Translated from the French of Baron de Vastey, which was dedicated “[t]o the Philanthropists of every country” (n.p.). The translator signed his name only W.H.M.B, but I have elsewhere identified him as a British botanist named William Hamilton (Daut, Tropics, 140–141 ftn20), an assertion I will return to in just a moment. Seeming to almost be in dialogue with the Strafford indictment, Hamilton defended Vastey’s “Bloody” linguistic style from any possible reading of the latter’s motives as malicious when he wrote:

If in some parts the language of wounded feelings appear too strong, or too acrimonious for English ears, let the reader cast his eye over the latter pages, containing a few specimens of the humanity of the ex-colonists, when power was on their side, and he will there find an apology which no feeling heart can hesitate to admit. (11)

Here, Hamilton, certainly influenced by Vastey’s own discussions of the barbarity of the ex-colonists, uses irony to call into question what kind of humanity can exist in a system of torture like slavery. Hamilton implores his ostensibly male British readers, therefore, to forgo harsh judgment of Vastey’s violent prose by putting themselves in the place of the formerly enslaved Africans of Haiti: “Let him for a moment imagine himself in the situation of a Haytian, witnessing the barbarities exercised upon a Father, Mother, Brother, Sister, Wife, or Friend torn to pieces by blood hounds, roasted by fire, thrown alive in sacks into the sea, or smothered in the holds of ships with the vapor of sulphur” (12).⁸ Hamilton continues by making an appeal to the sentimentality of his audience, which was fast becoming a popular strategy of abolitionists and other anti-slavery activists: “Let him call to mind these and a thousand other greater barbarities which cannot be enumerated,” Hamilton writes, “and the frown of criticism cannot but be relaxed into a tear—the severity of reproof lost in the overflowing of compassion” (12).

Hamilton’s reading and translation of Vastey’s writing encouraged and enabled not only a broad readership for the Haitian baron’s works but the adoption of precisely the sentimental views toward Haiti that the British botanist desired. Even though in Chap. 4, I argue that Vastey’s writings do not so much seek to evoke sympathy for the enslaved, as they promote the idea that the ex-colonists deserved to be legally punished, Hamilton’s writing is an extension of certain other facets of Vastey’s Black Atlantic humanist arguments. Hamilton not only encourages his readers in the Atlantic World to manifest sympathy for the plight of Haitians, but he argues for the irrefutability of their inherent humanity, and, most importantly, their right to sovereignty in the region. As a botanist, Hamilton was, however, interested in Haitian independence for scientific and agricultural reasons as well. These reasons fly against the grain of our understanding of the relationship between colonialism and science, empire and sovereignty and, thus, demonstrate why many European, and especially British natural historians, became unlikely allies of early nineteenth-century Haiti.

Previous research by James McClellan (1992), Londa Schiebinger (2004), and others (Hulme 1986; Young 1995; Iannini 2012) both assume and argue that science, and especially natural history , wholly supported colonialism and empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries. New research, nevertheless, has begun to put such assumptions into question. Julie Chun Kim, has asked, “what happened when the agents of scientific inquiry themselves possessed little commitment to the upholding of imperial order?” (“John Tyley”). The case of William Hamilton , who spent several years living in the West Indies and who was the principal translator of Haiti’s Baron de Vastey ,⁹ provides an interesting perch from which to consider this question. Hamilton’s profession as a scientist is key to his ability to use Vastey’s writing to make multivalent agricultural arguments in service of British empire. But these arguments were also laden with anti-slavery and anti-colonial rhetoric, which supported rather than undermined the sovereignty of Haiti that the British government would not officially recognize.

Before he published his botanical observations of the Caribbean, Hamilton, who lived at Cap Henry in the Kingdom of Hayti from at least 1817–1818, translated three publications of Baron de Vastey’s : Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites (1817); Political Remarks on some French Journals and Newspapers (1818); and the posthumously published, An Essay on the Revolution and Civil Wars of Hayti (1823).¹⁰ The purpose of publishing these works in translation was, in Hamilton’s words, to “furnish a most impressive and valuable illustration of the impolicy, no less than the injustice of slavery, and the evils which unavoidably flow from the colonial system” (An Essay i, emphasis in original). Since these translations were signed only with the initials W.H.M.B. (with the exception of Political Remarks on some French Works and Newspapers, which was initially published unsigned), a few words are in order that can help to establish William Hamilton , the botanist, as the translator.

The title page of Hamilton’s first known English translation of Vastey’s writing, Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites (1817), reveals that the book was “[s]old by J. Hatchard […], Bookseller to the African Institution¹¹ and may be had of the Booksellers in general” for the price of eighteen pence (n.p.). An advertisement from the publisher, F.B. Wright of Castle Street in Liverpool , tells us “[t]he following work, with the English version, was transmitted by the Translator to a friend in this country, with directions to submit the same to consideration of a British public” (5). Providing only a few more clues about the translator’s identity, the publisher notes that “the Translator is an Englishman, of a liberal profession, resident in the Island; who appears to have engaged in the task solely with the view of promoting a cause so dear to the interests of freedom and humanity” (5). The section called, “Translator’s Preface,” adds that the translator considered himself to be a mere “volunteer” (11), and, thus, not officially employed by the government of either Christophe or Great Britain.

The first item that helps identify William Hamilton , the nineteenth-century British botanist, as Vastey’s primary translator is an article entitled, “Original and Interesting State Papers,” from the Liverpool Mercury , dated 3 April 1818. The author of the article states, “We have been favored by a most respectable and intelligent friend, Dr. William Hamilton , now residing at Cape Henry, with the following interesting proclamation, which has not, we believe, appeared before now in any British print.” After reprinting Hamilton’s translation of Christophe’s proclamation,¹² the author inserts a “Note of the translator,” which reads, “Owing to the indisposition of Baron Vastey, preventing his attending to public affairs, a small error has crept into this proclamation ….” This article allows us to identify someone named William Hamilton as having lived in Haiti, as well as having been interested in translating Haitian documents, in addition to being aware of Vastey’s crucial role as the most important of Christophe’s political writers.¹³

In volume 5 of The Gardener’s Magazine and Register of Rural and Domestic Improvement (1829), the botanist Hamilton, this time signing his name as “William Hamilton , M.B.,” also translated and quoted from Réflexions politiques by the “late Baron de Vastry [sic]” (“Vines”). The initials M.B. stood for Hamilton’s medical degree in botany . According to his application for a Radcliffe Travelling Fellowship signed “William Hamilton, M.B. And corresponding Member of the Medico-Botanical Society for London ,” our botanist was a “Master of Arts and Bachelor of Medicine of the University of Oxford” (1832–1835, 1). The reference to the Vastey translation in the Gardener’s Magazine helps us to identify the William Hamilton, M.B. of the 1829 article as the “W.H.M.B.” referred to in two of the translations. And because the citation is from Réflexions politiques, it also establishes Hamilton as the translator of that unsigned publication (“Vines” 100). Although the English translation of Vastey’s Political Remarks was the only one of the Vastey translations that originally appeared unsigned, Hamilton’s translation of it in The Gardener’s Magazine allows us to also connect him to this publication.¹⁴ Hamilton cross-referenced the earlier translation of Réflexions politiques yet again in his English translation of Vastey’s An Essay on the Causes of the Revolution (v). Further cementing the connection, the British botanist would also reference Vastey as his “talented and lamented friend” in his Memoir on the Cultivation of Wheat in the Tropics (1840), which was also signed William Hamilton , M.B; while in the Memoir itself, Hamilton included yet another passage in translation from Réflexions politiques (90).

Hamilton’s interest in Haitian affairs went far beyond using Vastey’s works to decry the “injustice of slavery.” This is evidenced by a letter that Hamilton wrote to Baron Dupuy , which mentions his personal correspondence with Joseph Banks (see, “To Joseph Banks;” and Howard et al.).¹⁵ In the undated letter that Hamilton transcribes for the benefit of Banks, the botanist implores Dupuy to send him several specimens of two specific plants, namely the “Krameria ixina” and the “Théophraste américain,” “for the gardens of his Majesty at Kew.” Hamilton had explained to Dupuy in rather broken French, “I took with me two types of plants from your country, which are very beautiful and of interest, because this is the first time that they have been brought to Europe.” Hamilton wrote, nevertheless, that he was disappointed because as he explains, “[t]he seeds that I brought have not given at the present time any indication of growth, which greatly upsets me.”¹⁶

Hamilton’s interest in the astringent plants, often used to color wine, can be partially explained by the natural curiosity of a botanist. But he was interested in the agriculture of Haiti for more philosophical reasons as well. Hamilton consistently sought to make the argument that developing and encouraging sustainable crops, such as wheat , to grow in the “tropics” would help to combat slavery by making the forced labor of enslaved Africans unnecessary, or at the very least, less profitable. In the section entitled, “To the Reader,” from his Memoir on the Cultivation of Wheat in the Tropics (1840), Hamilton explains,

The increased facilities afforded to the culture of the [sugar] Cane, by the introduction of the Slave Trade, operated so powerfully to the exclusion of Wheat , as to create an almost total oblivion of its former flourishing existence, and give birth to an unfounded prejudice; the effect of which has been to render the modern inhabitants of these very regions dependant for their supply of this necessary article of human sustenance, upon distant countries, and far less favourable climates. (9)

Hamilton consistently likens what he calls the prejudice against wheat in the tropics to prejudices against Africans and their descendants in that same ecological space. He goes on to explain how slavery in the colonies had created broad food dependencies in the West Indies by making these islands (even where slavery had already been abolished by 1840) reliant upon metropolitan centers for basic commodities such as wheat and other popular foodstuffs like wine and corn. Hamilton found his evidence, in part, in the works of Baron de Vastey :

Other causes appear to have concurred with the African Slave Trade, in excluding not only the culture of the Cerealia,¹⁷ but likewise the manufacture of wine and other objects of European industry, from Haiti, under the Colonial Regime, which are fully explained in the following passage extracted from the ‘Reflexions Politiques’ of my talented and lamented friend, Baron de Vastey, […], and upon which comment is unnecessary: “Government has made many experiments: already it has sown, and reaped Wheat , Barley, and Oats; and we have ample proof that our having been so long without these substantial productions, has arisen only from the malice of the ex-colonists, and the identification of their interests with those of the mother country. The Carthaginians, the firmer to impose their yoke upon the Sicilians forbade the cultivation of Wheat under pain of death. In like manner, under the Colonial system, the cultivation of Wheat, or of the Vine, for the manufacture of Wine , was prohibited under the most severe penalties.” (qtd. in Hamilton, Memoir 10; original in Vastey, RP 108–109)

Hamilton viewed antipathy to the production of wheat, corn, and wine, as commodities in the tropics, as a mirror to the same prejudices that situated Africans as the forced laborers of an economy dominated by the sugar trade. He quotes Vastey to prove his point: “M. de Soleil, a Planter of Gonaïves, having made some pleasant wine, gave a portion of it to M. de Bellecombe, who was then Governor, to taste; who rewarded his zeal and industry by fine and imprisonment” (qtd. in Hamilton, Memoir 10; original in Vastey, RP 109 ftn). Apparently, not only suggesting that wine could actually be produced in the colony but going ahead and manufacturing it, was regarded by colonial authorities with as much suspicion as Strafford’s dissemination of Vastey’s Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères , the punishment having been nearly identical.

Hamilton was clearly influenced in his assessment of the legacy of food dependency left to the former colony by Baron de Vastey’s thoughts on the matter. In his Réflexions politiques (the work from which Hamilton quotes above), Vastey had written that what he called this “impolitic system” (RP 110) had been designed to enrich the plantation owners, at the expense of everyone else. “[L]e colon only envisioned sugar, coffee, indigo, and cotton,” Vastey wrote: “in short, the colonial goods, which could provide him with capital; it hardly mattered if poor farmers lacked subsistence, [and] perished from hunger and poverty” (RP 110).¹⁸ Vastey described these “colonial goods,” then, as merely a method for the planters to “buy food and slaves [des nègres]” for themselves and therefore to “fuel metropolitan commerce and the slave trade,” (RP 110) at the expense of everyone else living in the colony.

Twenty-three years later, Hamilton made an almost identical argument, tying the monopoly of the colonial sugar trade, in particular, to the slave trade, in general. In his Memoir, Hamilton detailed what he would call, “A Remedy for the Slave Trade” (2). This “remedy” involved his argument about “lessen[ing] the demand for human labour” (1) required to cultivate sugar cane. Focusing less on the production of sugar cane , and more on the production of wheat , he asserted, would undermine slavery as an economic system that depended upon human (and mostly, enslaved African) labor that only benefited the rich planters:

it has been objected to the culture of Wheat in the West Indies, that its introduction will have an injurious effect upon the black population, by lessening the demand for their labour; and were it proposed to convert the whole of the arable land in that quarter into fields of Wheat, there might be some plausible ground for the objection: since a Wheat Farm of a thousand acres may be fully cultivated by from 40 to 50 able-bodied men, aided by half as many women and children; whilst a similar extent of land under the culture of the cane requires at least one able-boded negro for every acre under tillage. (1)

Although, he explicitly mentioned the “negro” here, it was actually all forms of unfree labor that informed Hamilton’s argument. Slavery had already been abolished in the British colonies by the time that Hamilton published this Memoir, but unfree labor had not (see, for example, Emmer 2000). For Hamilton, maintaining and promoting the sugar trade as the primary colonial export meant to ensure the kind of caste system that would divide society into the ones who labored and those who stood to profit from it. The manufacturing of sugar offered a microcosm of class: “the culture of the Cane,” Hamilton argued, “is a lottery exclusively restricted to the wealthy” (1).

Hamilton’s critical take on the inequalities of the colonial food supply juxtaposed with his criticisms of slavery are important primarily because how much of his analysis appears to anticipate later critiques of capitalism. Hamilton’s deconstruction of the relationship of human labor in the colonies to capital in the metropole seems to anticipate Marx’s later writing about “estranged labor.” In 1844, Marx wrote,

On the basis of political economy itself […]we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – property owners and propertyless workers. (137)

In much the same way, Hamilton was concerned that laborers—enslaved Africans and ostensibly sharecroppers—were consistently alienated from the products that their hard work produced. Hamilton uses as evidence a letter he received from a friend still living in the colonies: “‘We could employ,’ says my correspondent, in a letter as recent as the 1st of January, 1840, ‘half as many more labourers as we have. The position which masters now stand in is an unnatural one: instead of labourers courting employment, the masters have to search for and make a favour of their services’” (1).

In short, Hamilton’s friend suggests that the colonies were in need of more, not less, human labor in order to continue to produce the awesome amount of sugar necessary to keep up with demand. Hamilton viewed this economic state of affairs as especially problematic. “This is an evil which the introduction of Wheat tillage will correct,” Hamilton writes, “by restoring the balance between the supply and demand to a more healthy state, and promoting that mutual dependence between the employers and the employed which forms the only cement of the social system, and has for this purpose been wisely ordained by a beneficient Providence” (1). Hamilton’s vision was of a Caribbean economy facilitated not only by free labor, but by choice of labor. He writes that he would like to see a tropics that could “give the industrious labourer a choice of occupation, […] enabling him to obtain wages proportionate to the degree of his toil” (1), and he finishes by making the argument that wheat is essentially more democratic. Wheat was democratic for Hamilton not merely as a metaphor for the fantasy of this more egalitarian agrarian society, whose exports would be entirely determined by the volition of its laborers rather than its proprietors, but as an agricultural fact:

While the costly outlay of capital, the length of time consumed in its growth, and the great fluctuations in the amount of its return, necessarily restrict the culture of the cane to the wealthier class of proprietors; the infinitely smaller capital required for wheat tillage, the lighter amount of labour to be expended upon it, the diminished risk of loss, and the greater promptitude of return, place it as fully with the reach of the ten acre cultivator in Barbados , as of the wealthiest planter in Jamaica: nay, even the poor and hitherto despised and persecuted black, in the intervals of his daily toil, may be able to till his half or quarter acre of wheat , take the produce to a neighbouring mill, feed his little family with wheaten bread, the produce of his own labour, and thus add, at the cheapest possible rate, to the amount of their little comforts. (64–65)

Hamilton’s ability to use Vastey’s works to weave together agricultural and anti-slavery arguments certainly complicates (but does not resolve) the idea that natural historians necessarily colluded (either deliberately or unwittingly) with their home governments to consistently uphold colonial rule and to prevent the kind of sovereign rule established by the ex-slaves and former free people of color in Haiti.¹⁹

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Haitian Sovereignty as Humanism

In the Strafford indictment, the sovereign rule of Henry Christophe is mentioned disparagingly over a dozen times. Such repetition underscores the colonial Jamaican government’s argument that Strafford’s connection to the “usurper” “Christopher” could only mean that the former was conspiring to bring Haiti’s slave rebellion to Jamaica, and therefore, to bring about the end of both slavery and the British empire. While sovereign rule may have represented a huge problem for colonialist Britain, nevertheless, many of England’s storied abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson , and natural scientists like Joseph Banks and Hamilton, used Vastey’s writings to ardently plead for formal recognition of Haitian independence. Hamilton argued, in this respect, that political sovereignty was already an incontestable reality in Haiti, and he found that Vastey’s writings could furnish the proof. In his preface to the English translation of Vastey’s An Essay on the Causes of the Revolution, published in Exeter in 1823 (three years after Vastey’s execution), Hamilton writes that Vastey’s history “practically demonstrates, that superiority of both intellectual and moral power, is not confined to any one complexion, and that generous and virtuous feelings are not the exclusive privilege of Europeans” (ii, emphasis in original). He connects his recognition of Haitian humanity to an argument for the country’s sovereignty when he contends that it is precisely “[i]n the instructive records of such a history [of Haiti], [that] we should see [in] a people […]after their emancipation from bondage, those dormant energies of the soul, and those latent virtues of the heart which we had been taught to believe them incapable of possessing, and, not only forming themselves into an organized and well regulated community, but starting, almost per salute, into notice, as statesmen, legislators, and historians” (ii). Here, sovereignty, rather than literacy, stands as the more dominant sign of humanity.

Unlike the characterization we found in the Strafford indictment, Christophe’s ability to establish a government of people of color signified humanness for Hamilton in as much as Christophe’s ability to organize the Haitian people into “statesmen, legislators, and historians,” provided the botanist with proof that “blacks” were capable of ruling and writing. Hamilton wrote, to that end, that Henry Christophe was clearly the most preeminent of the “statesmen, [and] legislators” to have emerged in independent Haiti :

As a statesman and a legislator, no less than as a warrior, the illustrious hero who sways the sceptre of the North, stands pre-eminently conspicuous, and the code of laws which bears his name, the wholesome regulations he has established in the administration of the state, the order and punctuality which he has introduced into all the details of office, and above all, the institutions he has founded for diffusing the light of moral and intellectual improvement throughout his dominions, are so many splendid monuments of the extent of his genius, and the liberality of his heart. (iii)

Hamilton’s assessment of Christophe as a humane ruler echoes that of another Anglophone botanist and natural historian who consistently championed the Haitian monarch as both an executive power and a legislator: Sir Joseph Banks. Banks was not only corresponding with and supporting the research of Hamilton, but he was also in contact with a New England schoolteacher of African descent who had briefly emigrated to Haiti named Prince Saunders . In 1818, Saunders, who had been in Haiti at the same time as Hamilton,²⁰ had written and published a letter addressed to him from Joseph Banks as a part of the following work, A memoir presented to the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and improving the condition of the African Race, December 11th, 1818: containing some remarks upon the civil dissentions of the hitherto afflicted people of Hayti, as the inhabitants of that island may be connected with plans for the emigration of such free persons of colour as may be disposed to remove to it, in case its reunion, pacification and independence should be established: together with some account of the origin and progress of the efforts for effecting the abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania and its neighbourhood, and throughout the world. According to Colleen C. O’Brien, “Saunders first published the book in London to enlist the financial support of wealthy British philanthropists who could underwrite his American emigration project, then reprinted it in the United States in 1818 and began lecturing, primarily to northern free black organizations who might be interested in emigrating to Haiti” (32). Before the letter begins, Saunders refers to Banks as “that illustrious personage” whose opinions “will serve to evince the views and sentiments […] of the abolitionists generally in Great Britain, upon the subject of Haitian affairs” (18). Like Hamilton, Banks also argues for the kinds of agricultural reforms that Hamilton would suggest in his 1840 memoir—relying on free rather than forced, coerced, or other forms of unfair labor. Banks asks Saunders to relay a message to that effect to Julien Prévost, the Comte de Limonade : “I hold the newly established government of Hayti in the highest respect,” Banks wrote. Speaking more directly of the Code Henry, Banks continued, “It is without doubt in its theory, […] the most moral association of men in existence; nothing that white men have been able to arrange is equal to it” (qtd. in 18).

What Banks found so admirable was precisely the portion of the Code dealing with the equitable treatment of laborers and their compensation. A statement following Saunders’ reproduction of the Banks letter directs us to the former’s English translations of some of the very articles of the Code governing the conduct of both the proprietors and the laborers. These codes in English translation had been published as a part of Saunders’s earlier Haytian Papers (1816). The first article listed under “Law Respecting the Culture,” maintains, “The proprietors and farmers of land are bound to treat their respective labourers with true paternal solicitude” (vii). The second article states, “The law exacts from the labourers in return a reciprocal attention to the welfare and interest of the landlord and farmer” (viii). The third article requires that “In lieu of wages, the labourers in plantations shall be allowed a full fourth of the gross product, free from all duties” (vii).

Arguing that these codes could prevent the alienation of the worker, Banks claims: “To give the labouring poor of the country a vested interest in the crops they raise, instead of leaving their reward to be calculated by the caprice of the interested proprietor, is a law worthy to be written in letters of gold, as it secures comfort and a proper portion of happiness to those whose lot in the hands of white men endures by far the largest portion of misery” (18). The Code Henry was not just a beacon for Haitians, then. According to Banks, the Code was ultimately a humanist rather than merely a Haitianist document. Banks wrote that “in due time,” the Code could help to “conquer all difficulties, and bring together the black and white varieties of mankind under the ties of mutual and reciprocal equality and brotherhood, which the bountiful Creator of all things has provided for the advantage of both parties”. Banks alludes here to an argument for the recognition of Haitian sovereignty by the (white) world powers: “I grieve therefore,” Banks wrote, “that the governments of white men have hitherto conceived it imprudent to acknowledge that of their fellow men of Hayti” (qtd. in Saunders 19).

In contrast, Hamilton did not appear to be merely grieving non-recognition of Haitian sovereignty. If Banks had simply thought that the ability for France to recover its lost colony was improbable—Banks wrote, “We must admit, that the French have a right to re-conquer if they are able; but this, in my view of the subject, is not within the bounds of the most extensive probability” (qtd. in Saunders 19)—Hamilton considered it more than imprudent and completely unwise. “May France then be wise enough to profit by the experience of the past—resign pretensions which she has no longer the power to maintain—and by the prudent forbearance of her future conduct with respect to Hayti,” Hamilton wrote, “entitle herself to the gratitude of a people who only require to be known to be admired” (An Essay ix). The admiration that Hamilton felt for Haiti, particularly, in connection with Baron de Vastey’s works, spread throughout metropolitan England, at least partially because of Hamilton’s own translations. These translations clearly enabled the circulation of Vastey’s rhetoric of the goodness of the Haitian king to the Anglophone world, and by extension, the transmission of his ideas about what it meant to be sovereign after colonialism.

The circulation effect of Hamilton’s translation is evidenced by several British reviews of Vastey’s works, which praised him with a language similar to that which we find in Hamilton’s writing. The British Review (1820), for example, applauded Vastey’s writing (via Hamilton’s translation) by saying that “a black” who had once been “deplorably illiterate” stood as a “specimen of the native black genius” (“History, Literature”), while the Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature (1819) wrote of Hamilton’s translation of Vastey’s Réflexions, “We have here a great curiosity, a vindication of the Negroes by a Negroe.” Going on to quote Vastey’s touching “I am a man” passage, the Monthly Repository reviewer was even “most pleased with [Vastey’s] expression of indignation at having such a task to perform” (“History, Literature, and Present State of Hayti,” British Review and London Critical Journal 15 [1820]) 74; and rpt in “Article VI,” Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature 14 [1819]: 329). The Quarterly Review, however, most clearly echoes Hamilton’s writing on Vastey in claiming, “Under every point of view, any fresh attempt of the French government to disturb the island would deserve the reprobation of mankind. The progress made by the inhabitants in agriculture and all the arts is quite extraordinary, but more particularly in education and general literature” (457). The writer’s proof lay in the work of Vastey: “Of this we have an interesting account given by the Baron de Vastey ,” the author writes, citing Hamilton’s English translation of “his ‘Political Reflexions on certain French Journals concerning Hayti’” (“Past and Present” 457–458).

Such support in the British press for both Haitian sovereignty and for a writer like Vastey may appear unsurprising in the abolitionist England of Clarkson and Wilberforce where slavery was fast becoming wildly unpopular. Yet support for the writing of Vastey in a country that was much more apologetic about slavery appears to provide a different sort of paradox. In the next section, we witness not merely praise of Vastey’s writings as an African “curiosity”—although there is a great deal of that as well—but we witness distinct political urgings toward the recognition of Haitian sovereignty in the northern U.S. press and made in the name of U.S. nationalism.

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Reading Haitian Sovereignty Through Vastey’s Reception in the U.S. Press

The perceived radicalism of Vastey’s arguments for Haitian sovereignty conjoined with the idea that “African” literacy was an exceptional phenomenon, probably accounts for the parenthetical doubt about authorship expressed by the author of the Strafford indictment. In quoting the following lengthy passage, the writer refers to the author of the Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères as “the Person purporting to be the Baron de Vastey ” (364):

Happy, if by my endeavours I, (the person purporting to be the Baron de Vastey) have been able to dispose of the prejudices which have been hovering over us for Centuries and to contribute to the happiness and improvement of my fellow Creatures. Mazères (meaning the said Mazères) defends the cause of the Ex-Colonists, of that Cast of Men, whose horrid System, and unheard of Crimes make nature shudder, and […] the cause which I defend is that of humanity at large; White, Brown and Black, we are all Brothers, all Children of the Eternal Father, all interested in the Cause of Man whatever may be the Colour of thy skin, whatever may be thy Station and Religion thou professes, thou are interested in the triumph of the Haytians, unless thou has smothered every Sentiment of Justice and Equality which God has engraved in all hearts. Thou canst not place the interests of a Cast of Men who are tarnished with Crime in the Scale with the interests of mankind. (qtd. in “Strafford Indictment” 364)

Somewhat remarkably, the author of the indictment found a way to interpret the above passage, which might in other hands merely seem like an argument for universal humanity, as being “[i]n contempt of our said Lord the King and his Laws.” The mere claim that “White, Brown, and Black” people were “Brothers” is positioned as a “great danger [to] the Rule of Government, good Order, Peace, and Tranquility, of the said Island of Jamaica” (364) precisely because Haiti’s sovereign present signaled a possible sovereign future for Jamaica as well.

Vastey’s sights were not on the future sovereignty of Jamaica though. Instead, his eyes were turned toward the present sovereignty of the United States. Vastey consistently used the United States as the only other independent nation of the American hemisphere as a point of political comparison and departure for Haiti. For him, the revolutions that had occurred in the United States and Haiti were both products of a “torrent and … coincidence of events” that had eventually culminated in the termination of a “bad marriage” with the metropole (RP 31). Vastey pointed out in his later publication Réflexions politiques sur quelques Ouvrages et Journaux Français (1817) that Haitian independence was hardly exceptional in a comparative historical sense because “all the changes that have taken place in Europe” since the classical age had been “the result of revolutions, revolts, wars, force” (RP 22, 23). The culmination of the Haitian Revolution in Haitian independence was in his mind simply a part of the natural, and somewhat inevitable, historical progression that had produced countless other changes to the maps of the world, including the creation of the United States (and ostensibly, the one that could have and did eventually, result in a change for Jamaica).

What was exceptional, according to Vastey, was that when Switzerland separated itself from Austria, the United States from England, and Portugal and the seven provinces of the Pays-Bas from Spain, these changes were “undertaken under the aegis and sanction of European public opinion” (RP 22). The Haitian revolutionists’ creation of a new nation-state, in contrast, was equated with “a political fiction” (RM 90). Thus, begins Vastey’s assiduous documentation of how Haitian exceptionalism as a discourse promulgated by European colonists to mask their “negative contributions” (M. Trouillot, “Odd and Ordinary”) worked to make the commonplace in Haiti extraordinary and the extraordinary mundane. To the suggestion that Haitians should monetarily compensate the French colonists for the loss of their plantations as U.S. American proprietors did for the English as part of Jay’s Treaty (1794), Vastey pointed out that the Americans did this in a state of relative peace, as propertied men who themselves sought compensation from the British for the loss of their slaves and for the confiscation of (U.S.) American ships (RP 48). Haitians, for their part, had been “deprived of everything… possessed nothing … were nothing, and … counted for nothing.” (RP 50) Consequently, Haitians had a right to the properties of the former French colonists since, in Vastey’s words, “we have conquered all over these vampires: country! liberty! independence and property” (RP 50). Though Vastey acknowledged that the laws of modern warfare, as opposed to ancient practices, protected both the persons and the property of the vanquished, he pointed out that “we do not find any comparable example to ours in the annals of nations” (RP 52).

Though Vastey’s statement above may seem like a contradiction of his earlier position that Haiti was not so different from other newly formed countries, it actually reflects his acute awareness that comparison must always move upon a shifting axis of sameness and difference. Although the U.S. and Haitian Revolutions had similar historical antecedents, according to Vastey, there was an immeasurable difference between U.S. and Haitian independence. This was because there was no equalizing comparison to be made between the material conditions of Haitians and U.S. Americans at the specific moments of independence in the two countries. Vastey observed that at the time of the Haitian Revolution Haitians had been “mort civilement” or “civilly dead” and “inhabited this earth as if they did not really inhabit it; … lived as if they were not really living” (RP 49–50). Vastey then asks, “Is it not a wish to distort everything, to find examples in subjects that are completely dissimilar?” (RP 49). On the contrary, Vastey pointed out that those who would become immediate citizens of the United States “were themselves white Englishmen, free and propertied [who] enjoyed their natural civil and political rights, [and] no one disputed them these rights” (RP 49).

In other words, the U.S. American Revolution focused solely on the question of independence, not emancipation. And because Haitians had been what Orlando Patterson would later describe as “socially dead” beings,²¹ any comparison between the two acts of independence that sublimated the racial distinctions of Haiti as a country populated mostly by Africans who had been, “black and enslaved, without country, without property, deprived of their natural rights” (RP 49), only contributed to Haiti’s threatened position in the New World, while the United States enjoyed economic and political prosperity as one of the privileges of whiteness.

Vastey’s comparison of Haiti to the United States did not go unnoticed in the Atlantic public sphere. Even if the composer of the Strafford indictment doubted variously Vastey’s “Africanness” and/or his authorship of the document published under his name, by 1817 Vastey was already fairly well known in the United States as a famous black author. Vastey’s budding notoriety was a result of the publication of his most famous work, Le Système colonial dévoilé (1814), which circulated heavily in the northern United States in the early nineteenth century, even without having been fully translated into English (See, Daut, “The ‘Alpha and Omega’”).²² Vastey’s name would have also been familiar to U.S. readers on the basis of a later publication, Le Cri de la conscience (1815), characterized by a reviewer for the Boston Daily Advertizer as having a “great zeal and ingenuity” (“Boston: Friday Morning, Sept. 15, 1815,” 2).²³ A brief review of Vastey’s Notes à M. le Baron de V. P. Malouet… en réfutation du 4ème volume de son ouvrage, intitulé: Collection de mémoires sur les colonies, et particulièrement sur Saint-Domingue (1814), published in the North American Review in May 1815, refers to Vastey’s work as “well and eloquently written” (“Miscellaneous and Literary Intelligence,” North American Review 1.1 [May 1815]: 134). Vastey’s name would also have been known to readers of U.S. newspapers due to the publication of Le Cri de la patrie (1815), the work where Vastey most ardently attacks the southern Republic of Haiti and which at least one U.S. newspaper chided for its “false defamation of Pétion” (Weekly Recorder, July 10, 1816).

Later, the future U.S. attorney general, Caleb Cushing , a journalist whose anti-slavery and pro-Haitian sovereignty arguments helped Vastey’s words to spread across the U.S., provided a lengthy and much reprinted and referenced review of Vastey’s Réflexions politiques (which had been translated into English by Hamilton in 1818)²⁴ in the North American Review . Cushing wrote, “The works of M. de Vastey are very favourable specimens of the native mental force of a Haitian” (Cushing, “Article VI—Refléxions politiques,” 112).²⁵ Cushing even began to internalize Vastey’s own understanding of the meaning of Haitian independence for the hemisphere repeating Vastey’s very own words about Haitians needing time to produce esteemed writers and politicians such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington (Vastey, RP 31). Cushing echoed Vastey’s words again when he wrote that the French were responsible for all civil strife in Haiti (131), and he also bought into Vastey’s ideas about the unreasonableness of requiring the Haitian government to compensate the French colonists when he wrote: “No man of course but a colonist can seriously think the king of Hayti was under the least obligations to restore the lands of the planters, or even give them an equivalent” (124).

A more radical adoption of Vastey’s language and rhetoric occurs when Cushing defends Christophe’s monarchy:

A nation, which has attained considerable refinement, which is tranquil within and threatened by nothing but ordinary dangers from abroad, can enjoy a free and republican government; but when a country has been plunged for two centuries in the lowest degradation, when its inhabitants have been sunk below the level of ordinary political oppression, and when, although exalted to the rank of a nation, it has continued to be harassed by restless and able enemies,—in such a country, the firm hand of kingly power is needed to stifle faction, repel aggressors, and give energy, dispatch, and secrecy to the public measures. (116)²⁶

Cushing continued by repeating Vastey’s very own words: “Little does it matter, indeed,” he wrote, “what is the form of a government, if it be sagely conducted, and its only aim be the public happiness and peace” (119; see also, Vastey, RM 73).

Not everyone in the U.S. print circuit agreed with Cushing’s enthusiastic assessment of either Haiti or Vastey. On February 17, 1821, The Literary Gazette , Or, Journal of Criticism, Science, and the Arts, published a review of the very issue of the Boston-based North American Review in which Cushing’s review of Haitian publications, including those of Baron de Vastey , was produced. The author of the review published in The Literary Gazette was evidently not impressed by the North American Review’s most recent issue, observing, “There is less good writing and rather more pretension, less novelty of thought or variety of style” (100). When the reviewer arrives at “Article VI,” Cushing’s piece, we are told that in this section: “We find a view of the present condition of Hayti, derived from a long list of publications placed at the head of the article,²⁷ and it would seem from some personal knowledge possessed by the writer of the country” (102). The reviewer wasted no time in getting to the heart of the critique, as the very next sentence reads, “The Baron de Vastey , the Alpha and Omega of Haytian intellect and literature, has furnished the principal materials for this review, as we perceive he has done for similar articles in the Quarterly and British” (102).²⁸ In an effort to read Vastey’s race as a legend for reading his writing, the reviewer makes use of the trope of monstrous hybridity . Vastey is subsequently described as a “coloured philosopher,” who, borrowing Cushing’s language, “is ‘a yellow man either a mulatto or mestizo’ and therefore not quite so high in the scale of humanity as the unmixed African race” (102; Cushing 113). Such an assessment of Vastey’s lack of “humanity” in connection with his “mulatto or mestizo” identity did not bode well for the rest of the review. Suspicion appears to have been the reviewer’s dominant hermeneutic when the reviewer writes that Cushing, “gives a long detail of the barbarities inflicted upon the negroes by the French colonists, the authority for which we may remark is rather suspicious, as it seems in part derived from the Quarterly Review” (102). The reviewer for The Literary Gazette sought to cast aspersion not only on Vastey, but on Henry Christophe in contesting Cushing’s claim that “[t]he late King Henry […] was a person of ‘fine features, noble presence, and accomplished manners,’ and was considered by his subjects in the light of an affectionate father” (qtd. in 102). “The late revolution ,” in contrast, the reviewer writes, “has unfortunately affected the soundness of this latter opinion, and confirmed the truth of the old observation respecting the difference between the good qualities of a living and dead monarch” (102).

This sentence perhaps unwittingly captures both the temporal and subjective nature of nineteenth-century critiques of Vastey’s works (and by extension, Henry Christophe’s reign). During his life, and in the immediate aftermath of both Vastey’s death and Christophe’s own suicide, Vastey was almost universally praised in both England and the United States for arguments that writers thought transcended either blackness or whiteness, Africanness or Europeanness/Americanness. In the U.S. public sphere, specifically, Vastey was even considered a visionary, whose works proved the righteousness of Haitian sovereignty, the ability for “Africans” to achieve civilization , and an undeniable common humanity. It was primarily in the decades after Christophe’s death, in some senses anticipated by the assessment of both Vastey and Christophe in The Literary Gazette , that the tide of positive public opinion, bookended in certain ways by Cushing’s writing, would change for Vastey as well. This change can be meaningful to us when juxtaposed with the greatly contrasting arguments used by Cushing to promote Haitian sovereignty as beneficial for U.S. nationalism.

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Reading Haitian Sovereignty through U.S. Nationalism

Cushing selected the nine works under review in his article because, as he wrote, “Some of these works have considerable intrinsic merit; and we have therefore resolved to place them before our readers, not only because they are little, if at all, known in this country, but also because they were written by the descendants of negroes, and by nobles of the late kingdom of Hayti” (112). He went on to explain why he planned to focus primarily on Vastey:

The writings of M. de Vastey, which consist of a chief part of the works at the head of this article and of a few pamphlets of less importance, are very favourable specimens of the native mental force of a Haytian. Self-educated, as are most of his countrymen of any distinction, struggling constantly for the first thirty years of his life against every thing which could damp or stifle a literary ambition, he has nevertheless acquired a respectable style, a correct knowledge of his language, and a store of information of considerable variety and extent. (112–113)

Cushing believed that these works stood as evidence for Haiti’s potential to flourish as a sovereign state and he tied this assessment to the concept of racial regeneration. Regeneration was a crucial point for Cushing because, as he wrote, “We consider the single fact of their regeneration as decisive in favour of the blacks. Never was a servitude more complete, never was abasement more hopeless, never was ignorance more deplorable, than that of the slaves of Saint Domingo” (115). He connected Vastey’s writings to the post-Enlightenment discourse of regeneration and degeneration circulating in the Atlantic World. Because he saw Vastey as “self-educated,” Cushing applauded the fact that the Haitian baron had arisen out of what he called the “lowest moral and intellectual degradation, by the force of his own powers.” On the strength of such a belief Cushing wrote that “the vehemence of the once oppressed, but now victorious soldier, the fire of an emancipated slave, the vigorous pride of a regenerate African are all wrought into the style” of his works (114). Cushing concluded on this score that Vastey’s writing proved “the regeneration of Hayti,” saying, “we may hope that before long they will have wiped away all the disgraceful stains contracted in a life of bondage” (120).

The word “regeneration” had a particular meaning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By “the [French] Revolution , regeneration had become an extremely popular and more general word, referring to improvement, a freeing from corruption, or societal renewal” (Sepinwall, “Exporting the Revolution” 45). By the nineteenth century, regeneration was equally connected to both the abolition of slavery and racial “miscegenation.”²⁹ According to Robert Fanuzzi , early nineteenth-century U.S. writers were distinctly affected by the French discourse of “the elevation of the African race” through “structural” and “institutional philanthropy” (580). The idea that slavery had caused a corruption of humankind that only abolition and philanthropy could cure would become a favorite claim of abolitionists like the Abbé Grégoire , who claimed that slavery corrupted equally the masters, slaves, and the free people of color (De la noblesse, 52, 82).

Vastey had also internalized the idea that slavery had resulted in a complete corruption of humanity, and he therefore understood Haitian independence as a part of a larger post-Enlightenment project of rehabilitating humankind. Vastey wrote that after the Haitian Revolution , humanity had triumphed and “the regeneration of a large part of the human race [was] beginning” (Système vi). Not only did Vastey believe that humankind was being “regenerated,” but he also believed that whatever happened in Haiti would mean something for the world and not just for “Africans” (RP 1). This a priori conflation of literacy with humanity and civilization may have been part and parcel of the Enlightenment and the burgeoning science of race,³⁰ but it also formed a crucial element in early U.S. American as equally as Haitian assessments of postcolonial Haiti’s potential as a sovereign state.

American writers like Cushing appear to have been open to accepting Haitian writing, in general, and Vastey’s writing, in particular, as proof of black capacities for nationhood precisely because they were involved in their own project of national consolidation through the development of a specifically American U.S. literary and political tradition. In the United States this project of literary sovereignty as humanity was intimately connected to a “cultural milieu” that “sought alternately to solidify and to signify across the unstable boundaries of nation and race within a New World arena characterized by its transnationality” (Brickhouse, Transamerican 7).

Yet the consolidation of U.S. American identity was also formed in conjunction with a fantasy of imperialism paradoxically bound in certain ways to the recognition of Haitian independence. An article in the Boston Commercial Gazette argued that it would be in the best interests of U.S Americans to recognize Haitian independence so that the Haitian government might allow “our ships of war” to be stationed in the port of Môle-Saint-Nicolas (BCG et al.). The expression of this desire to station U.S. troops in Caribbean waters seems now like a dangerous precursor of what Paul Farmer has called “the uses of Haiti.” Almost immediately after Christophe’s death in 1820 and again after the United States formally recognized Haitian independence in 1862, the United States “began showing great interest” in Môle-Saint-Nicolas (Farmer, Uses of Haiti 72). The long term desire to station U.S. troops somewhere in Haiti was immediately coupled with the stability and validity of U.S. democracy when the author of the article in the Boston Commerical Gazette continued:

Under the influence of reason and sound sense, a more enlightened policy than has yet existed towards the Haytiens will arise, and the declaration of our bill of rights, that ‘ALL MEN ARE BORN FREE AND EQUAL’, [will] be considered as having some weight in the scales of justice and humanity. When this period arrives, it will become our duty, as a moral people, to seek their alliance, that we may the more readily aid them in the advancement of learning and Christian philanthropy . (BCG et al.)

The article oscillates uncertainly between patrimony and militarization of Haitian-U.S. relations, coming dangerously close to proposing a civilizing mission of “Christian philanthropy.” This civilizing mission would perhaps provide closure to the project of the American Revolution that the continuation of slavery in the United States had stifled.

The United States’s revolution was supposed to have brought liberty to the hemisphere, but as the Abbé Grégoire observed, the United States would have to do something about its enslavement of more than “one million six hundred thousand Africans” “to conciliate, as republicans, this contradiction of their principles, and to justify, as Christians, this profanation of evangelical maxims” (De la noblesse 86). If it was true that, as Brissot de Warville observed during his visit to the United States, “Americans, more than any other people, are convinced that all men are born free and equal” (qtd. in Fanuzzi 582), then the philosophical underpinnings of U.S. identity were threatened by a policy toward Haiti that was viewed as devoid of “reason and sound sense.” The very existence of masses of rebelling enslaved Africans and Haitian revolutionists who would write their own Declaration of Independence, as Nick Nesbitt has written, “presented freedom to the world as an absolutely true logic,” and one that had to be made “universal”: the Haitian Revolution had meant that “no humans can be enslaved” (Nesbitt, “Idea of 1804,” 8, 17). If no humans could be enslaved and Haiti was both the argument and the proof, then the United States’s revolution was not just incomplete (Fanuzzi 582), but, as Sibylle Fischer has noted, was of spurious virtue (Modernity Disavowed 9).

Vastey acknowledged that U.S. slavery confounded the meanings of liberty and revolution for the world when he wrote: “The independence of the United States of America has been a source of goodness for Europe and the entire world; ours will contribute to the Happiness of the human race, because of its moral and political consequences” (RP 15). In Haiti (in great contrast to the United States), a life out of chattel slavery was not just for people of certain complexions or social stations, but was for everyone.

Moreover, Vastey’s argument illustrates what Ralph Bauer has called two different and competing conceptions of the nation-state in the Americas as it developed into the twentieth century: one as “the agent of hemispheric or global hegemony” and the other as “a protection against United States cultural, economic, and military expansion” (Bauer 236). If the U.S. as a nation was defined and indeed “imagined” in terms of a limitless expansion, the nation-state in early Haiti was conceived of in terms of clearly defined unity within the border of Hispaniola . In other words, in nineteenth-century Haiti, “cultural nationalism” might be considered what Simon During has called in another context “a mode of freedom” that was “developed against imperialism” (139, emphasis in original). There was surely a desire in Haiti to unify the north and the south and even the eastern parts of the island, as Vastey noted in his 1819 letter to Clarkson (rpt. in Griggs and Prator 180–181), but there was not an evident wish to expand the borders of the country beyond the limits of the island; nor was there any considerable effort made to transfer the Haitian ideals of universal emancipation and liberty for all human beings to other countries in any way that accorded with the U.S. American belief that it has to the right to “violently export” (Moten, “Democracy” 77) its democracy to other countries. Vastey vehemently argued against the slave trade and the horrors of colonialism in Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères , Le Système, and Notes, but simultaneously affirmed that Haitians were not going to meddle in the affairs of the other countries in the hemisphere. Furthermore, Vastey pointed out that the Codes of Christophe, as Dessalines’ 1805 Constitution had already done, expressly prohibited Haitians from interfering with “affairs outside of our island” (RP 36).³¹ Vastey also explicitly noted that Haitians did not desire to create a Caribbean empire when he wrote: “The revolution did not transfer from the whites to the blacks the question of control of the West Indies.… Haiti is one of the islands of this archipelago and is not itself the Caribbean” (Notes 7).³² Vastey’s point was that Haitian nationalism was not going to be defined by or based upon its ability to expand its territories, but rather upon Haitians’ own particular claim to sovereignty over a small part of the region.

The above gloss of certain key tenets of Vastey’s writing is crucial for understanding his influence on Cushing’s assessment of Haitian independence and right to sovereignty. Cushing’s understanding of Christophe’s Haiti derives entirely from his reading of Vastey. Like Banks and Saunders, Cushing praises Christophe for the “compilation of the Code-Henry,” which he called an “act of equal wisdom with the establishment of royalty in Hayti” (122), and lauds the country for being non-imperialistic, both assertions being allusions to Vastey’s reading of the monarchy. Cushing writes: “Content and happy to live in peace, satisfied with their lot, they felt no desire to disturb the tranquility of their neighbors” (122).

Also, like Vastey, Cushing understood the Haitian Revolution to have been a beacon for humanity that was without precedent in the Atlantic World. “What revolution has the world ever beheld,” Cushing asked, “that was comparable to this in the credit which it does to the aptitude and perseverance of its leaders? Other revolutions were conducted by men who were free…who had before enjoyed the rights of men and knew how to prize them; who were comparatively speaking enlightened and civilized” (115). The Haitian Revolution, in addition to Haitian independence, was proof of African humanity for Cushing as well: “Surely not more convincing argument in proof of the capacity of blacks could be required, than their achievement of such a revolution” (115). He offered as evidence, “A few extracts from the Baron de Vastey ,” which he said, “will show the sufferings of his countrymen to have been without any thing similar in revolutionary annals, and will justify us in the severe terms in which we have alluded to the colonists” (116). Perhaps, most importantly, Cushing, much like Hamilton, did not believe that France stood any chance of reconquering Haiti and noted that though “France has never ceased to long for the restoration of her colonial dominations,” “Hayti, not withstanding her divided and fluctuating governments, continues and probably ever will continue independent” (118).

If Christophe’s monarchy was a huge problem for a French abolitionist like the Abbé Grégoire (as we will see in the final section of this chapter), it was not at all a problem for Cushing. The U.S. writer told his readers,

It is impossible, therefore, not to praise the design which established a monarchy in Hayti, strengthened the king by the grant of adequate power and endowed him with revenues and military forces for his defence against foreign and domestic assailants. The recent death of the king has, it is true, been followed by a revolution in the government; but, as we shall take occasion to remark hereafter, this circumstance neither proves the king was bad, nor that a monarchical government was ineligible in Hayti. (119)

A fascinating defense of monarchy as a potentially more fruitful form of government than a republic follows the above defense of Christophe when Cushing writes, “Hayti, we doubt not, enjoyed more prosperity under the scepter of an absolute king, than she could ever have hoped for from republican institutions” (119–120).

Other northerners were similarly bold in their argument that Haiti had a right to, at the very least, choose its own system of governance, even if the choice was ultimately a monarchy. This is a point to be found in a toast given by Rufus King, who, like many Federalists , was  “unabashed” in his “defiance of Jeffersonian policy towards Haiti.” King reportedly stated, “To the government of Haiti, founded on the only legitimate basis of authority—the people’s choice” (qtd. in Zuckerman 194).³³ The prior review of Vastey’s work in May of 1815, also published in the North American Review , had a more semantic reason for defending Christophe’s monarchy: “There is as pretty and numerous a collection of Princes, Dukes, Counts, Barons as any country in Europe could produce,” the article states; “indeed England is quite outdone; she has produced only one Black Prince, but in St. Domingo there are many. These titles sound as well as any similar appellations; and may wear as well as older ones. If the colour of the heart be right, that of the skin is of inferior importance” (“Miscellaneous and Literary Intelligence” 134). Finally, an additional U.S. journalist even went so far as to defend the “military attitude” of the north of Haiti by writing that it was “necessary, perhaps, as a preservative against the attempts of France” (“Article V” 406).

It might at first seem astonishing that a monarchy, with its attendant “collections of Dukes, Counts, Barons” and “Black Prince[s]” was so openly defended in a country whose origin story rests upon the opposition between monarchy and democracy. John Adams’s very own “Defense of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States” (1787) had provided a harsh critique of “kingly power” by suggesting that the “American people” were too “enlightened” to ever allow the “executive power” to rest with “one single person.” The force of Vastey’s influence over U.S. reviews of his work, however, lay in his recognition that international democracy in its more metaphysical possibilities rather than in its actual literal applications rested not in imposing one nation’s government on another but in accepting that different peoples might choose to be governed in different ways.

To that end, in his Réflexions politiques, Vastey pointed out the hypocrisy of those who criticized Haiti’s black king while they showed deference to their own white king (17). In so doing, he clearly spoke to a European audience. His defense of monarchy as a system of government, however, was also explicitly directed at the United States. Vastey knew that if he wanted to appeal to his U.S. audience, he would have to defend the monarchy on racial, as well as theoretical grounds. This is why he devoted an entire chapter in his Essai to defending the monarchy as a system of government. In his earlier Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères he had already taken up the topic, writing that the method of government hardly mattered as long as it was “wise, just, enlightened, and benevolent, and the governees have religion, virtues and good morals!” (RM 73). Vastey further wrote that since no two peoples were exactly alike, no single form of government could suit all nations. To that end, he paraphrased Montesquieu to prove that it would be an error to think that a republican government was always better than a monarchy since “the best constitution is not the one that is most beautiful in theory, but the one that suits itself the best to the people for whom it has been made” (Essai 147–148). This statement seems specifically aimed at the United States since Vastey appeared to view the country as having a democracy that was an exceptionally good form of government with “sage laws” that were specifically suited to the U.S. mindset. His point, nevertheless, was that such a democracy might not be exportable. Remarkably, this idea of democratic relativity was implicitly accepted by many of those in the early United States who both read and published responses to Vastey’s words, and even adopted some of them, to defend the Haitian government of the north.

*

Vastey and Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century France

Cushing imagined a Haiti not only politically divorced from France but also linguistically and culturally separated from its francophone origins. He wrote that Christophe “could not hesitate in adopting that language, which now possesses a literature unrivaled by the proudest in ancient or modern times, which is making rapid strides to a diffusion almost universal, and which is spoken in the first instance by two nations of which one is the noblest in the old and the other the noblest in the new world” (125). Cushing, in fact, argued for United States recognition of Haiti on the grounds that Haiti wanted to be more like the United States, with its “unrivaled” Anglophone literature. He invited Haitians to join in the imagined solidarity of England and the United States by adopting the English language and by degrees its literary tradition. This invitation hardly reflects the kinds of isolation and non-recognition—cultural, diplomatic, and commercial— described by many scholars of early Haitian-U.S. relations (Leyburn, Haitian People, 11; and Mintz, Foreword to Leyburn, Haitian People, vi). Rather, it indicates that many writers from the Atlantic World, through their engagement with Haitian writing, imagined and even acknowledged the independence of that country—a fact that somewhat complicates the fable of non-recognition. 

New research shows that nineteenth-century Haiti cannot be fully characterized as operating within a “century of isolation,” (Leyburn 11) specifically, with respect to England and the United States. Julia Gaffield’s Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World (2015), for example, thoroughly complicates the so-called  “isolation thesis” (qtd. in Gaffield, 198 ftn5). Gaffield writes that approaching nineteenth-century Haiti from the perspective of “isolation” fails to “capture the many and varied ways that foreigners interacted with Haiti during and after the period of diplomatic non-recognition” (2). If isolation signifies a lack of contact, my own research also challenges the popular belief that Haiti was culturally isolated by non-recognition in the first two decades of independence. In fact, Vastey—like King Henry Christophe , who addressed a letter to American merchants in the Republican Watch-Tower on July 28, 1809—understood the power of the press to influence popular ideas about Haiti and often used it to his own advantage.³⁴

Although new scholarship has begun revising earlier narratives about Haiti’s relationship to England and the United States in the nineteenth-century with more nuance than the “isolation thesis” ordinarily allows, there continues to be a void with respect to historical treatments focusing on Haiti’s relationship with its formal colonial occupier, France. There is, nonetheless, evidence of some support for Haitian independence in early nineteenth-century metropolitan French publications.

In fact, the most surprising defense of Vastey’s work, viewed by many writers in the Atlantic World as a distinct argument for Haitian sovereignty, came from France. Despite his country’s exceeding hostility to the Kingdom of Hayti in the early 19th century,³⁵ in 1819, historian Antoine Métral penned a laudatory article in two separate installments for La Revue encyclopédique entitled, “De la littérature haïtienne.” Referring to Vastey’s “magical eloquence” (533), Métral wrote of Le Système colonial dévoilé, Vastey’s most ardent work attacking the French colonists: “M. de Vastey’s exclamations are sometimes biting and impetuous like those of J.J. Rousseau . He refutes in the same manner all those who claim that the civilization of Africa is impossible” (Part 1, 534). Métral had earlier said that Vastey’s “anger is dignified” before going on to quote him, to that effect, from Réflexions politiques: “Strength, courage, virtue, and vice,” Vastey wrote:

do they derive from the skin or from the heart of man? Well then, if that is the case, if it is only the difference in color that is a crime in your eyes…, arm yourselves, revolt against the vision of the Creator who wanted for there to be different types of man on earth. (qtd. in Métral, 1: 528; original in Vastey, RP, 18–19)

Métral concludes of Vastey’s œuvre:

The work from which I have drawn these proofs of the genius of a black writer, is a refutation of the system of colonization proposed in a huge volume by M. Leborgne de Boigne .³⁶ Did Baron de Vastey spare any vehemence in his attack? He employs, without a doubt, thunderbolts of eloquence. His path is bold, frank, and new; he has risen to the heights of his subject and he only allows his adversary to live in order to fight him person to person. Whoever judges with impartiality these two works, will see just how much the black man has bested the white man in point of style, with the power of his thought, and above all with the eloquence that follows. The white man writes with his mind, but the black man writes with his heart. He writes for liberty, and it is from liberty and from the heart that the great inspirations of genius flow. (534–535)

Despite Métral’s bold defense of Vastey’s writing, the early nineteenth-century France of Christophe’s era can be characterized by its hostility to both anti-slavery thought and the abolitionist movement (Hoffmann, “Lamartine, Michelet” 343; Heuer 537; Kadish 669–70). In his “Observations sur la constitution du nord d’Haïti” (1819), the Abbé Grégoire recognized as much when he wrote that, while England abounded with “friends of the blacks” such as Clarkson, Wilberforce, James Stephen, and Zachary Macaulay, he was very well alone in France.³⁷ He also declared that as a result of his almost singular anti-slavery activism, “supporters of trafficking and slavery have especially directed against me their persecutions and their anger” (152).

In his earlier De la Traite de l’esclavage des Noirs et des Blancs (1815), Grégoire alluded to the way that the current and former colonists, as well as other metropolitan pro-slavery apologists, had attempted to negatively characterize the philanthropic abolitionist movement of which he was a part. “They even tried, without succeeding, to stigmatize the word Philanthropy ,” Grégoire wrote. “Then, according to the language as it was in usage at that time, it became routine to repeat that the principles of equality, of liberty, were metaphysical abstractions, or even mere ideology, because despotism has a logic and a slang that is all its own” (16).³⁸ In this same publication, he praised the northern kingdom of Haiti for its stellar government and legislations directly in service of his anti-slavery argument: “In the north of the Island, which is the most important part,” Grégoire said, “the blacks have a completely organized government. It is evident that a legitimate legislation presides over all the branches of the administration” (43).

Despite characterizing his opinions on both Haiti and the abolition of slavery as extraordinary, Grégoire had two friends in France who were also generally anti-slavery. Civique de Gastine, who died in Haiti on 12 June 1822 (Rahul 97–99; Benot, “Grégoire contre Christophe,” 145), published a generally sympathetic history of Haiti entitled, Histoire de la République d’Haïti ou Saint-Domingue, l’esclavage et les colons (1819). Grégoire’s other friend, Antoine Métral (Benot 144), more closely followed in Grégoire’s stead, writing about nineteenth-century Haitian literature. Grégoire had published his De la littérature des nègres in 1808, which argued for the ultimate humanity of “negroes” by demonstrating their capacity for literacy. In contrast, Métral’s articles affirmed a specifically Haitian relationship to literacy and by extension, a defense of Haitian sovereignty.

Métral acknowledged the influence of Grégoire’s earlier publication on his own work when he wrote that Haiti’s progress toward “civilization had been announced in advance by M. l’évêque Grégoire, in his book on the literature of the Blacks, a work filled with new and erudite research” (526). Métral further stated that in De la littérature des nègres, “L’auteur,” meaning Grégoire, “had proved that the Blacks were men, and these men had intelligence, and that their intelligence made them capable of solving the most difficult problems” (526). Speaking of the “burning eloquence” of Dessalines, Métral claimed that the founding documents and speeches of Haitian independence could similarly be used to contest the dehumanization of “black” people found in much of eighteenth-century European writing.

Métral appears to have understood nineteenth-century Haitian literature with the more capacious definition of the literary, as promoted by Deborah Jenson in Beyond the Slave Narrative (2011). Speaking of the letters, memoirs, constitutions and other official documents issued by Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Jenson writes: “I contend […] that the words of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines are literary in the degree to which they harnessed poetics to persuade large audiences, represent the stakes of freedom and domination, and engage in political construction of themselves and their constituencies” (9). If historian David Geggus has had trouble with Jenson’s assignation of sole authorship to Dessalines (Geggus, “Haiti’s Declaration of Independence”), Métral found no such problem.³⁹ Métral observed: “We find the same nobility of thought in the correspondence of Dessalines with Rochambeau during the time when the French army was forced to abandon Saint-Domingue” (140). After quoting a lengthy passage from a speech that Dessalines gave shortly after he declared Haiti independent, Métral characterized the former’s “veneration for the ashes of his ancestors,” who had died in the name of Haiti’s independence, as “this sublime impulse” (529). Métral characterized another of Dessalines’s speeches as having offered “a new form worthy of the epic” (529).

Métral reserved special acclaim, however, for the proclamations and speeches of Christophe of whom he wrote: “The many proclamations of Christophe are filled with original beauties” (530). The French writer also viewed the Haitian king as having a nuanced understanding of tone and audience: “We could not write such touching truths with more simplicity, nor with more force; and with an inimitable candor, he forgets that he is the king to get closer to the spirit and heart of the simple people […] He takes on another tone when he addresses himself to the magistrates” (530). Métral quotes Christophe as having written to these magistrates: “Be the organs of the law, be just, be unblinking like it; always defend the rights of the weak and the oppressed against the unjust attacks of the powerful” (qtd. in Métral 530).

Métral’s reading of the humanist Christophe is a far cry from the kind of despotism described in accounts of the Haitian leader describing Christophe as a “black emperor” who was “imitating his white brother [Napoleon]” in committing “robberies” (Evening Post May 25, 1810). Métral referred to Christophe in a much more paternal light in writing: “These exhortations are filled with a gentle sensitivity; this is a father who speaks with tenderness; but what a difference in language when this same chief lets loose his indignation against a powerful enemy who threatens the liberty and independence of his States” (530).

Despite their friendship, by 1819 Métral’s assessment of nineteenth-century Haiti, and specifically, of the northern kingdom of Christophe, differed remarkably from that expressed in the later writings of his friend, Grégoire. Speaking of both the north and the south of Haiti, Métral wrote: “These two peoples are walking together towards civilization; enemies by their constitutions, they are united in their common defense” (525–526). Speaking more particularly of the northern government, Métral found: “Justice is here rendered with impartiality. Laws are written in codes that are clear and precise, a regular finance system prevails that requires taxes to be paid more by the rich than the poor” (526). If the laws of the Kingdom of Hayti could stand as evidence of its civilization, so, too, did the writing of Baron de Vastey . “The works of M. de Vastey,” Métral writes, “that we have already cited, are filled with instructive details about the progress of the civilization of the blacks, about the manner in which they are educated and made useful to perform all of the different functions of society” (145).

Grégoire similarly esteemed the writing of Vastey. He said in the 1819 publication that “Vastey’s Réflexions politiques […] reveal a very distinguished talent” (“Observations” 151). But although Grégoire had praised the northern kingdom of Haiti in the 1815 publication, by the time he wrote the “Observations,” his opinion about Christophe had undergone a forceful change. Whereas he refrained from criticizing the institution of a monarchy in Haiti in the 1815 text, in 1819 Grégoire wrote of Christophe’s kingdom: “This form of government is all the more shocking as it contrasts with the principles currently in circulation in the two hemispheres, and which are everyday growing more forceful, and will gradually change the face of the political world” (“Observations” 149). Grégoire continued, observing that it was curious that while the Americas were generally moving away from the “despotism” and decadent wastefulness of royalty (“Observations” 149, 150), Haiti was moving precisely in that direction: “We ask ourselves how,” Grégoire writes, “they could have instituted an absolute monarchy next to a republic, which sanctions all rights, and in the vicinity of the American continent, which has republics in every corner” (149). He further claimed that monarchies were inherently prejudicial: “The nobility of the scrolls is just as absurd as that of the skin, which the colonists wanted to award exclusively to the color white” (“Observations” 150).

Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall confirms that the Abbé Grégoire was “disgusted with the return of monarchy” in northern Haiti, and for this reason was an ardent supporter of Pétion. In Sepinwall’s words, Grégoire was “appalled that as much of the world was slowly adopting republican principles, the North of Haiti was abandoning them. He was especially incensed at the irony of blacks’ creating a system based on arbitrary titles” (“Exporting the Revolution,” 48). While Métral viewed the laws that reigned in both governments of Haiti as equitable and fair, in his 1819 “Observations” Grégoire argued, much to the contrary, that Pétion’s style of governing was far superior to Christophe’s. The French priest wrote: “Now, of the two constitutions in use, one in the North, and the other in the Southwest of Haiti, the latter established in 1806, revised and improved in 1816, is the only one that contains the fundamentals required to assure the rights and consequently the happiness of the people” (“Observations” 149). Because of this and similar statements made by Grégoire in the “Observations,” Yves Benot has argued that the purpose of Grégoire’s text appears to have been to refute the obviously more conciliatory stances towards Christophe of Civique de Gastine and Métral . Benot writes,

we will see that the points of view about the regime [of Christophe] that Grégoire refutes here are those of Civique de Gastine in a book published in 1818, and those expressed in articles in the Revue encyclopédique in the first half of 1819, by Métral, principally. In both of these cases, we are talking about Grégoire’s friends, and he writes precisely in order to help them to see more clearly. However, although these writings were explicitly addressed to his French friends, we might ask ourselves if, indirectly, he does not also have in mind the pro-Christophe sympathies of his English friends, James Stephen, the Tory, but also Clarkson. (144)

The differential readings of nineteenth-century Haiti by Grégoire and Métral provide an opportunity to think about encounters with historical subjects like Vastey—and by extension, the Kingdom of Hayti—from multiple rather than singular perspectives. A broad range of possible explorations of the meaning and consequences of nineteenth-century Haitian sovereignty for Black Atlantic humanism manifest in the constellation of conflicting readings of Vastey and contradictory reports about Christophe’s government. The following fraught question posed by David Nicholls could easily be also posed about Christophe’s kingdom: “Into which category does Vastey fall: true radical—pointing to a firm foundation for a new national identity—or opportunistic spokesman of a new, self-serving elite?” (108). This question represents an attempt to find certainty where ambiguity exists. We would like to know, and often think we can know, the real Vastey, in the same way that many of our attempts to historicize the era of Christophe lead us down the path of trying to determine whether his government was as despotic (or benevolent), as some reports suggest.

Glissant’s theory of opacity offers a much different approach to historical analysis, one that can help us move us away from positivism, empiricist fact-finding, and ultimately, our potentially misguided quests to uncover the truth. The Martinican philosopher, in conversation with Manthia Diawara remarked, “There’s a basic injustice in the worldwide spread of the transparency and projection of Western thought. Why must we evaluate people on the scale of transparency of the ideas proposed by the West?” (14). Glissant likens the demand for such transparency to a form of barbarity: “Everyone likes broccoli but I hate it,” he says,

But do I know why? Not at all. I accept my opacity on that level. Why wouldn’t I accept it on other levels? Why wouldn’t I accept the other’s opacity? Why must I absolutely understand the other to live next to him and work with him? That’s one of the laws of Relation. In Relation, elements don’t blend just like that, don’t lose themselves just like that. Each element can keep its, I won’t just say its autonomy but also its essential quality, even as it accustoms itself to the essential qualities and differences of others. (15)

Perhaps, we, too, need to remain more open to the elements of Vastey’s writing (and nineteenth-century Haiti) that unsettle and even disturb us. That is to say, those elements that strike us as contradictory or propagandistic—is he a radical or an opportunist?—distasteful and possibly out of character for a humanist.

Can we find peace in understanding Vastey as both one of the earliest and most ardent defenders of black humanity in the nineteenth century and also a faithful proponent of a monarchical government in independent Haiti ? As Alexander Weheliye has asked, “Why are formations of the oppressed deemed liberatory only if they resist hegemony and/or exhibit the full agency of the oppressed? What deformations of freedom become possible in the absence of resistance and agency?” (2). In essence, I am asking if we can we consider the statist actor (Vastey) also as an agent of black (humanistic) radicalism?

This question about whether we can accept a certain level of opacity when evaluating Vastey’s works (and Christophe’s government) is one that must necessarily be posed to us living as we do within a system where “black” and “human” when joined together are words understood to present not only a paradox, but an impossibility. The difficulty that many writers have had in acknowledging Vastey’s philosophie as populist, in both the past and the present, bespeaks a continuation of the same hermeneutic circle that has silenced Haiti’s revolution in mainstream world history. Thinking about Vastey as primarily a Christophean scribe, and therefore not as an autonomous intellectual, paints an impossible picture of black writing. If the western world was incredulous at a “crown on the head of a black man!” (Vastey RP 17), it appears to have remained equally nonplussed at humanist arguments flowing from the pen of a person of color working under a “black man” with a crown on his head.

It continues to be difficult to assess black writing (read: black sovereignty) in the context of a world that continuously said it was as impossible as a crown on the head of a “negro.” How can a sense of writing as a purely aesthetic vocation emerge in an era when black people existed in the broader imaginary, as much as in reality, as commodities to be bought, and sold, and traded?

For nearly the entire nineteenth century, people of African descent were those one spoke “for” rather than “with.” In as much as they contested the idea that “Africans” were not human by promoting awareness of their literacy, and their sovereignty, Métral and Grégoire also affirmed the extraordinary consequences of viewing blackness as incompatible with humanity in the first place. Entire philosophical discourses had been devoted to disproving the humanity of “Africans,” and now entire narratives were being and would continue to be created that proved the opposite, the essential humanity of people without white skin, using mountains of cultural artifacts to bolster these counter-narratives. Imagine the enormous global effort that to this day continues to be exhausted in service of Black Atlantic humanism.

Haiti’s entry into the republic of letters provided some of the earliest material that supported these counter-narratives. “When an emerging people shows such love and aptitude for letters, is there anything that we cannot hope for its destiny?” Métral asked, “Letters are the soul of a civilization; without them, a nation remains ignorant and barbaric, and with them its glory shines for future generations to come” (148). His beautiful statement demonstrates precisely the quandary of Haiti as the scene of an impossible aesthetic. Métral wrote that with Haitian authorship, “the world will be offered for the first time the spectacle of black men, who had until now been savages or brutes, stolen from their native land, led into servitude across the Ocean, breaking their chains, forming a new society, creating in their midst the beaux-arts, and cultivating them with a success that will stun posterity” (148).

This is the signaling of an aesthetics of impossibility. Colonialists have never been stunned into humanity by black writing. Recall Frantz Fanon’s famous maxim: “colonialism will never blush for shame by spreading little known culture treasures before its eyes.” (The Wretched of the Earth 223) Glissant, for his part, was even more disheartened by the impossible humanity signaled by Haiti’s extraordinary artistic output. Of Haiti’s attempt to create itself into existence in a world that continued to reject and attempt to destroy it, Glissant said, “it’s shattering to see a people massacred to this degree and still producing great painting, fantastic Caribbean music, and a literature. I think there’s a question mark there as well. What’s happening there? And can a people be purely and simply annihilated in this way?” (Diawara Interview 14)

As long as we attempt to understand Haitian writing using a vocabulary designed to deny agency and even to eliminate the possibility of people called Black or African to be considered human, the ultimate meaning and legacies of early nineteenth-century Haitian sovereignty will continue to elude us. In the end, the kind of Black Atlantic humanism in operation in Vastey’s work marks both the philosophical tradition and the legacy of a nineteenth-century aesthetics of sovereignty that we may never fully comprehend.