Reviews for Melting pot soldiers

The average rating for Melting pot soldiers based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-05-21 00:00:00 Danial Michael In Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean Alfred N. Hunt discusses the Southern reaction to Louverture. Drawing on newspaper commentary concerning Saint Domingue in the Southern press, he concludes that many Southerners were ready to disregard racial animosity toward Louverture’s reign once his conservative direction on labor issues became clear. It was only after the violent cleansing undertaken by Dessalines, he points out, that an embargo of the island was put in place. Hunt makes this observation within the context of his larger argument that the southern United States, and especially the Deep South in the antebellum period, should be understood as the northern rim of the Caribbean basin culture. For Hunt, the North is peripheral and he understands the unfolding of Southern attitudes toward slavery in the context of a development within the larger Caribbean World rather than a debate between slave holders and abolitionists. While doing the service of documenting the contributions made by refugees from Saint Domingue to Southern culture, Hunt’s work mainly turns on Eric Foner’s contention that the stability of the labor force was the primary political consideration for the planter elite, and it is through this lens that he interprets their reaction to events in Saint Domingue. “Americans saw the complicated, long struggle for control of the colony as quite different from the subsequent history of the Republic of Haiti,” he tells us, noting the cautious approval expressed of Louverture’s administration and contrasting it with the anger and panic engendered by both the initial slave uprisings in 1791 and Dessalines’ career. Hunt tells us that the early and late phases of the Haitian Revolution led to a retrenchment of the Southern racial order. Observing that the gens de couleur had weakened the solidarity of the ownership class, individual grants of liberty were curtailed. Reading back the initial slave uprisings from their legitimization by the radical French Republic, fear of Jacobin ideological infiltration led to internal censorship. Noting the demographics of Saint Domingue, the importation of new slaves from Africa was banned, beginning with minority white South Carolina in 1792. Within the historiography of America’s relationship with Haiti, Hunt’s 1988 work stands somewhat apart in its focus on shifting Southern attitudes toward Saint Domingue, from the initial uprisings through the regimes of Louverture and Dessalines. This may be partially due to his conflation of Southern attitudes as evidenced by publications and the attitudes of Thomas Jefferson. Conclusions that “it was only after his [Louverture’s] death and Dessalines’s massacre of whites that cautious slave owners such as Thomas Jefferson turned against St. Domingue,” or that in imposing an embargo on Haiti in 1805 Jefferson was “yielding to French pressure,” perhaps belong to a time when the negative aspects of Jefferson were less widely published and discussed. Not long after the publication of Hunt’s work Jefferson’s star was on the wane and his ongoing paranoia and hostility toward the Haitian Revolution became better documented within historical literature. In whatever way Hunt’s misinterpretation of Jefferson may qualify his conclusions about planter toleration of Louverture, it is worth observing that the interaction Hunt captures between Saint Domingue and the South in the 1790s were based on appraisals of the colony and Louverture as a place and a personality respectively, rather than as symbols. Following its declaration of independence in 1804 and the imposition of the embargo Haiti’s relationship with America moved onto a more ethereal plane.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-12-26 00:00:00 Bill Day Please , who has a copy of this book?