Reviews for Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution

The average rating for Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-05-22 00:00:00 Belinda Robinson Matthew Clavin's 2010 work Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War argues for the importance of the Haitian revolution and the image of its leading statesman Toussaint Louverture to the argument between slaveholders and abolitionists in antebellum America. Far from the obscurity in which the Atlantic World's first Black republic is steeped today, Clavin shows that Haiti and its revolution were prominent in American discussions of slavery and abolition. Abolitionists invoked Toussaint Louverture's chivalric disposition to calm white fears of free blacks, while free black men invoked his memory to prove that their race could meet the demands of Republican manhood by fighting for liberty. Pro-slavery orators, by contrast, constantly invoked the "horrors of Saint Domingo" based on accounts of embittered white refugees that detailed black atrocities against whites in order to assert that abolitionist agitation would lead to a brutal race war, a charge abolitionists turned back on them by claiming brutal race war would inevitably result from the continuation of slavery. One of Clavin's more interesting claims is that viewing southern slaveholder's beliefs through the prism of their rhetoric on Haiti sheds a different light on the Confederacy, arguing that "In spite of the long-held belief that the political philosophy of the Confederacy was steeped in the radical republican tradition of the late eighteenth century, secessionists openly professed the counterrevolutionary nature of their movement" through the equation of abolitionists with Jacobins. While acknowledging that "the Louverture these speakers and writers manufactured only partly resembled the one in the historical record," Clavin argues that the stories and symbols in them possess powerful agency in how people understand their own identities, going so far as to claim that when Lourverture's repressive labor codes were cited by General Banks as a template for his treatment of freedmen, the fact that Haiti was invoked itself accelerated the reconceptualization of blacks as citizens.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-03-06 00:00:00 Peter Jones The best short summary of the topic I've read - does a great job of painting the historical arc of slavery and freedom, and situating the American experience within that arc and within its historical context. Highly recommend.