"Men of color, to arms!": Remembering Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution in the American Civil War

Haiti's Declaration of Independence at the opening of the nineteenth century marked the end of a slave rebellion of unprecedented size and scope. It was the culminating event of a racial and social revolution, which had a profound impact on the slave societies of the Atlantic world. The effect of the Saint Domingue, or Haitian Revolution, on the United States was in particular tremendous. This was especially the case during the Civil War, when the American people at last confronted the racial paradox that defined their short history. Public memory of the Haitian Revolution aided in the construction of two competing and racialized national identities during the war. African Americans and their radical white allies used the Haitian Revolution and especially the indomitable black slave general Toussaint Louverture, to reinvent the United States, imagining it as an enlightened, multiracial, and colorblind society in which African Americans figured prominently as citizens, soldiers, and men. Conversely, white southerners employed the iconic event in the construction of a Confederate nation, which was committed above all else to defending the institution of slavery and perpetuating white racial supremacy. This project explores the ways various publics appropriated opposing narratives of the Haitian Revolution, through an examination of three major Civil War-era debates: (1) violent abolitionism and secession; (2) black soldiery; and (3) emancipation. Popular attention to the Haitian Revolution at the revolutionary and transforming time of the Civil War reveals much about the construction and uses of historical memory, as well as its role in conceptions of national identity. That this milestone in African American history meant so much to the American people at such a defining moment illuminates moreover the significance of black history and culture in the making of America. The brutal and bloody war that ended slavery in the United States sparked an outpouring of public remembering of past people and events. It was in remembering Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution that the American people learned as much about themselves as they did about the slave revolt that took place on Haiti more than a half-century before.