Amherst Reads Transcript

Jen Manion: Hi, my name is Jen Manion, I’m an associate professor of history at Amherst College, and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to talk with James Alexander Dunn, author of “Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America”, which was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Hello!

James Alexander Dunn: Hello! Thank you for having me. Thanks for reading my book, I really appreciate it.

JM: Thrilled to have the opportunity, both to read it and to talk to you--

JAD: I’m thrilled to talk with you too, I’m a long-term admirer of your work, and we’ve met each other before too but… it’s great to get a chance to talk to you.

JM: Yeah, so I’d love to jump right in, because I’m always curious about how historians identify their topic, and… you say that between 1789 and 1804, the events in Saint-Domingue rocked the Atlantic world. Everyone at the time knew something was happening, and they were reading about it in the newspapers, but this is something that historians have been slow to recognize. So I’d love to hear why you feel this is an important story that needed to be told.

JAD: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s… well, from the perspective of someone writing a book, it needs to be told because of the thing you just mentioned, you correctly observed. It was all over sources I happened to be reading, newspapers and letters and such, intense and continued attention and notice and discussion of these events, that we of course take as the Haitian Revolution from our perspective, but at the time were current events. And was apparently an interesting current event, because people were transfixed by them in the newly United States. So the sort of basic need to tell the story because it was a story to them, and obviously more than that, too. It was something that they were not just re-printing and bandying about but actually discussing and incorporating into other elements… other issues people at the time were interested in. So that was sort of the basic… it was the purloined letter kind of thing, it was this thing that was around, that was in the records that wasn’t being discussed. Or if it was being discussed, there are some historians that took it on, people writing in the 19^th or early 20^th century who took notice in the United States of the Haitian Revolution… but it was often this horror story alone, a very simple kind of tale of… a collective American, usually tacitly white, freak out of “ah! Insurgent slaves! A black republic” and with varying degrees of, frankly, racist takings of this place as a savage nation that’s borne in blood and this sort of thing, there’s obviously a whole lot more on that too, so I wanted to tell those stories and sort of parse apart the way that early Americans – white and black – tried to make sense of these events as they took place. There’s another sort of more historiographic answer, I guess, and this is something I’m sure is familiar to you… and it’s related, I guess. Historians, until very recently, didn’t talk about the Haitian Revolution in the same sentences that they talked about the American, the French Revolutions, let alone the Russian or Chinese or Iranian or anything. It wasn’t part of that discussion. I really feel like that is a vestige of that omission, it’s a vestige of… maybe a cold war kind of mentality, where revolutions were meant to be at least among Western historians, something to be recovered for their ideological probity and coherence. And… it was part of a larger cultural project, maybe, to find a revolution that wasn’t scary and radical like the Russian or the Chinese revolutions, or perhaps the Iranian one. In other words, it could be a revolution that was in some sense or another, conservative or progressive towards Western values. And if you’re going to talk about revolutions that way, it’s very easy to leave the Haitian Revolution out. I think… it’s a flaw, but it’s the case.

JM: Right.

JAD: The famous Palmer book, the Age of Democratic Revolutions, doesn’t mention it once.

JM: Wow.

JAD: So, for me, now that we think about revolutions in a more nuanced and I think a more overt way, revolutions not as simply productions of ideas or if they are, in conversation with structures of… material structures and interests and contingency and politics, it’s unavoidable to talk about this one that A) everyone was talking about at the time and B) that had such a great impact in this Atlantic space. Long first answer.

JM: No, no, I love hearing about historiography. But I also wonder if historians were kind of caught up in some of the same anxieties that white Philadelphians felt, that you talk about. I think specifically of Elizabeth Dranker but also some other people, you know, white Philadelphians felt anxious themselves – or maybe even ambivalent or antagonistic – about having memories of the American revolution linked to the Haitian revolution, I’d love to hear more--

JAD: Yeah, I think that’s… there’s always a degree among white audiences of anxiety, although I think I’ve found more nuance and ambivalence and even a degree of positive acceptance of black violence among white receptors, than folks have expected. There are the sort of… hm, not exactly voices in the wilderness, who say, well gosh, I thought all men were created equal, so these are just men. And now I’m referring specifically to the moments of slave violence, insurgent violence in the French colonies in Saint-Domingue. You know, this is what happens. And that ties into a larger vein of discussion about slavery in the 18^th century, and you know this well, where rebellion… rebellions, after all, are kind of a category of actions that slaves do that people have in their minds, they know this is one of the things that happens when you have enslaved bodies of people. And this is just a really big, and it turns out, pretty long-lasting one, at least at the start, right? And so some of the same explanations for why slaves rebel get trotted out as they watch this big one take place. Oh, this is what happens when you enslave men. Men actually resist tyranny, and therefore what’s the cause of this insurgence? It’s slavery. And in response, a counterpoint is no, no, this is… slave insurgences happen because outsiders interfere with this institution of slavery that can be maintained in perpetuity unless people mess around with it, right. So there’s lots and lots of white discourse floating out around slave violence. The kicker is this all gets wrapped into discussions… contemporary discussions around the French revolution as well, and therefore about the relationship between a burgeoning republic based on natural rights and universal sort of humanity - as is unfolding apparently at least as of 1789 to let’s say 92, 93, in France, and its most important colony which is 1,300 miles to the south… So, when all these different discussions get wrapped together, you find a great deal more ambiguity among, yes, Philadelphians, but also… a more widespread American audience that’s reading Philadelphia newspapers and talking about France, and Saint-Domingue in the same sentences they’re talking about the need to resist Hamilton’s conservative agenda, and Washington’s seeming anglophilia, and all these things; it gets interwoven into these other political discussions. So there’s way that these folks suggest degrees of acceptance, degrees of understanding, rationalization, even if they distance themselves from it and say “that’s what happens in a French place”. They still see it as something that’s rational and understandable in those terms.

JM: Right. So, you mentioned the newspaper, and they play a significant role in your book. I was wondering if you could just tell people a little bit more, generally, about newspapers in the early republic.

JAD: Sure, yeah, and I’m standing on some wonderful shoulders here of scholars who have written about the important vehicle for language and discourse and ideas that early American newspapers are. It’s not too long ago that people discounted newspapers as any sort of evidence, because they were so full of invective and they were so partisan and… a lot of air, really. And in fact, that’s exactly what makes them so wonderful as sources, and as ways to get a look onto… not hard, reported, objective fact, but more political culture, fringe culture writ large. The way this colony was talking to itself as it formed. And I think there’s an argument to be made that it really forms through newspapers. Americans had more newspapers than just about anywhere else in the world at this point, and were growing newspapers at a faster rate than just about anywhere else… The early American colonies, there’s an act in 1792 that allows newspapers to circulate between post offices for free of charge, so newspapers sort of flood around the early Republic. And I think in the process of reading, and re-printing, and listening to newspapers read aloud, people really began… Americans really began to conceive of themselves as Americans, to see an American identity in the process of reading and talking about the news. And again, I’m not the inventor of that notion, I’m standing on lots of scholars’ shoulders there thinking that through. So even as they’re disagreeing vociferously about whatever they’re reading about and the politics of the time and the moment, I think they’re sort of constituting an American identity in that process.

JM: Right.

JAD: So what I decided to do was… I happened to come to this project as I was also learning to use some database software, and I decided to just collect every mentioning of news from Saint-Domingue – the French colony that would eventually become Haiti – in Philadelphia. And, back in that time, it was before digitization so I was actually transcribing it all into this database, getting terrible Carpal-Tunnel Syndrome along the way. [Laughs] And certain nausea from looking at micro-films and that sort of thing. So charting the way information moves became something I could sort of see the utility in doing. I could see how news that would arrive in one port would circulate regionally, through other newspapers, but as soon as it hit Philadelphia which had the most newspapers and [inaudible] really important commercial place… the news would explode outward across the new nation, and really take on a different kind of power and presence. So that’s why I started the study in Philadelphia, as a way of making a case for that information hub and the motor that those newspapers were for moving these ideas around, getting into people’s hands in the form of newspapers and into their mouths and minds in terms of the language they used to talk about this stuff.

JM: It’s really exciting, you know, I think before I read newspapers from this period I had assumptions that they would be provincial. And it’s shocking, when you find how much the news is about, and from, other colonies, and other countries.

JAD: Mhm, yeah.

JM: Like they’re so much more cosmopolitan and rich.

JAD: Yeah, yeah, and I think--

JM: [inaudible]

JAD: Yeah, yeah, that’s very true. And I think there’s an assumption I may have learned from grad school about, people didn’t print the news from the town they were in, because the assumption was… these were still pretty small places. But even that seems to not be true to me, I see lots of things in Philadelphia being written in Philadelphia explaining what’s going on in Philadelphia. Let alone, just the wealth of information coming in from around the world. I mean, obviously, this is mostly from the West Indies and Western Europe, but from other places, too. We have to remember, this is before the telegraph. This is before a moment when places far away from each other could really know about each other without a human body moving between them. Telegraph really changes that, running electric currency along a wire and someone can hear about something in another place that’s far away. But before that, a human person, a body had to move between the two places, and they’re the ones who are going to bring their stories, their letters, the accounts, the newspapers, from that other place. So for a place to know another place, people had to move between it, and the reason people are moving in the 18^th century for the most part is to do business. And so… that thing you just talked about, the cosmopolitanness, is also a measure of the commercial connection of, in this case Philadelphia, but other places too, and their sort of stocks around the world. So of course Saint-Domingue was a place they were interested in, because Saint-Domingue was this goldmine for American grain sellers and merchants. It was where they made their fortunes, and it was the most successful colony the world had known at that point. So that was another sort of head-slapping moment, why am I seeing this news so everywhere in the United States? Well, of course, because it’s as if the Silicon Valley succeeded or something, or there was a rebellion there or something. It’s important to talk about.

JM: Well, I’d love to jump in more deeply, specifically to this slave uprising in 1791, which seems like such an important turning point, not only on the island itself but also for Philadelphians and others that were following the news. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about why that was such an important turning point?

JAD: Yeah. I mean, it’s… like I was suggesting, there’s real interest in this place leading up to that moment because it’s so important and so, you know, commercially central. And then it just… there’s moments of violence before the insurrections of 1791, between white factions or [inaudible] French Revolution, it’s a pretty interesting moment when the island’s free people of color rise up and there’s some effort to try and restore… to reclaim the rights of citizenry, once the French Revolution has gotten going. But without a doubt, the thing that really rivets Americans’ attention, despite their interest, is its spectacular destruction, which now begins a new and important phase after August of 1791. Slaves had risen up around the world before, people understood that, but never in this size. Something like 2,000 in a single instance, in August 22^nd, and then within weeks it’s 80,000. And it’s not all at once, Saint-Domingue doesn’t all at once simply fold into slave violence, I think that idea is a vestige of our idea of… déjà vu sense of slave violence. In fact it’s episodic, it ebbs, it flows in different parts of the colony, at different times… but without a doubt, there’s definitely a trend from that moment onward towards this plantation society falling apart and falling away and transforming into something very different. So I think people are fascinated. They use it, they think about it in terms of discretion in terms of what makes slave insurrections happen, they wonder about whether this is the result of sort of French ideas, these notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity are interfering with slave systems’ controls, or they talk about if this is part of a vast conspiracy, or they talk about it in terms of justice of black freedom struggles. That’s certainly the way the distant voices – African American voices that I’ve been able to witness – receive it. So it’s immensely useful, and usable among a variety of American audiences, and they use it to great effect. They start talking about their own revolution, or continue talking about their own revolution, and what its legacy for the institution of slavery should or seems to be.

JM: Right. So, I think one of the ideas that you really complicate is the impact of the Haitian revolution, and the successful slave revolution, on ideas that white Americans were grappling with on the role of slavery in American society. And especially around, you know, what black freedom would look like. And this black freedom necessarily meant black equality, and citizenship. So I’d love for you to… to hear more about how you found the nuance in this, because so often we thought it was just more of a simple, negative correlation, that the revolution in Haiti in many ways caused Americans to just harden in their racist attitudes, that they had to do whatever they needed to do to make things the social hierarchy. And you show us that it’s a more complicated picture than that.

JAD: Yeah. I’m glad, thank you. [Laughs] What you came away with, that’s certainly what I was going for. And it’s not to say that that hardened racial understanding doesn’t happen, it’s just interesting to see how it happened, and where it happened over time. For example, among white southerners – or to the extent we’ve been able to recover their responses – it is there from the outset. It is there from how they understand the slave insurrection once it gets going, it’s interference on the part of outsiders, the thing I was just mentioning, that slaves need to be enslaved, it’s proof of their innate savagery, etcetera, etcetera. But looking out there, and looking at this thing, this discourse, in the newspapers, it’s a window onto… as you said, there’s more fluidity, there’s more flexibility, there’s more nuance, as people attach different particular moments of Haitian events… those that gambit for free colored – or as they’re called, the free people of color’s – gambit for civic equality, for example, that’s attached to these questions. And yeah, people say, it does seem to make sense, that the rights of man should apply universally. After all, we here in Pennsylvania are moving that direction, we think, and are trying to end slavery gradually, and this is something that’s happening in other parts of the newly United States as well. So it gets incorporated into discussions around those kinds of developments, and can be made logical, and can be made into something that’s sort of… seems like a harbinger of future changes, and things are going in the right direction. Which is not to say there’s not people no, no, that’s not right, that’s incorrect. So as you say, it just adds another wrinkle and a degree of fluidity, so we don’t miss the eventual racial understanding and hardened ideas about slavery, but see how they are formed and how they are political at their heart. A big moment that moves us in that direction is when the emergent Jeffersonian party is victorious in 1800, and at the same moment, sort of pushes aside some of the more radical, egalitarian ideas – at least the ones that were transracial – that had been bandied about in the 1790s, and makes the equality they seem to stand for white equality alone. That’s a big moment. And so, seeing that, you understand the weight of that moment, and you see how things could have been at least potentially different, earlier on. I think above all, what you see looking at all this, is it’s a birth of another kind of American exceptionalism. Early on, early 1790s, people who thought American slavery was bad – white and black – thought that slavery, therefore, was a problem that the American Revolution and this new nation it was creating needed to solve, and needed to solve in a single way. It needed to be an American solution to this problem of slavery. And they make a gambit, to do that. There’s a series of petitions given to Congress, there’s actions taken by abolitionists and abolition societies, and there’s some hopes that there’s going to be a single, national – in their eyes – end to slavery. And what they learn in the course of that gambit, but also as news from Saint-Domingue percolates through American politics, is that there’s not going to be a single American answer to the problem of slavery, there’s going to be a variegated answer to the problem of American slavery. In some places, that answer is gonna mean the gradual end of slavery, like in Pennsylvania, eventually in New York and New Jersey and much of New England. In other places… it’s not. In other places it’s going to be an answer to the problem of slavery that allows slavery to endure, maybe done in some quote-unquote “American” and therefore some sort of good, palatable, more humane way, but it’s going to be sort of… yeah. Variegated across the American colony, versus having a single universal answer to the problem of slavery. That, too, is a development I think we see better over time, from my study. It goes hand in hand, with that hardened sensibility you started off with in your question.

JM: It’s interesting because one of the things we see in the records of this time, even from white abolitionists, is there seems to often be a narrow path that free blacks, or even enslaved African Americans, can follow, in order to make what is a palatable, seem to be reasonable case for freedom or the expansion of rights. And if they seem to go too far – and this is definitely the case in Pennsylvania –or they are acting in a way that’s “too entitled”, for freedom or an expansion of their rights, then we often see a white backlash.

JAD: Right.

JM: And I’m wondering if… just to tie in, I wish listeners could see the cover of your book, and I encourage them to get your book and look at the cover for this image, because it’s very… it’s a very powerful image. And it’s very evocative. And it suggests that ominous doom, and great destruction, result from black freedom. I’d love to hear you reflect on that a little bit.

JAD: Well, I’m glad you like the cover, I do, too. [Laughs] And it took me a long time to get it, because it comes from an image in a museum in Bordeaux, it took some doing to get them to agree to let me use it. And I wanted it because… yes, as you say, it evokes that sort of horrific frame notion of what’s going on there. But it isn’t an imagined scene. It’s meant to be painted from life, or from an actual event. Versus the posters the listeners may be familiar with, the lithographs, or the 19^th century images of the massacre by the slaves… sort of imagined scenes from the water fronts or the burning of plantations, which are kind of, like you said, imagined pictures that come from people’s descriptions that don’t have any sort of relationship to someone who actually saw it, saw this on hand…. Whereas this is taken, or seems to have been, painted from, an image from, the decks of the ship, right? It’s looking at an event that actually happened in June of 1793. So I liked it for that, because it was an image of this dangerous moment of violence, but it also suggested the vantage point I wanted, and also with the smoke coming up, this idea of this thing was wafting outward, and was ready to be investigated and interacted with by people who would see that smoke. But… you’re absolutely right. The ultimate, or dominant, export here in this idea of Saint-Domingue is this notion that black freedom creates violence. Or can create violence. Blacks living in Philadelphia at the time, you know, were very interested in pointing out the way their freedom, for example, did not produce violence. And in fact maybe even held off moments of violence. Because they had been given, granted, taken, however you want to talk about it, a degree of freedom; they weren’t full citizens in many ways, nor were they slaves. And slavery was being gradually, partially, haltingly, glacially, dispensed with, at least in Pennsylvania. So that’s the way they… African American voices are always hard to get to in our period, I love the way you do it in your work, by the way. By looking at actions and how they show up through white-derived documents and such, that seems to be the best way to do it. But I do see one or two moments where African American leaders do sort of hint, we deplore the violence that’s going on… I’m thinking of the famous pamphlet written by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen in the wake of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793. Where most of what they’re doing is fending off the charge being made that the blacks who helped with the nursing and the burying of the dead had taken money or shaken down their patients. They refute that, but then they stop, if you remember, and they write a separate piece in that compiled pamphlet where they address slaveowners, people who like slavery or approve of slavery, and say, look at the violence that’s taking place in Saint-Domingue, that’s sort of a judgment on that society, like perhaps the Yellow Fever is – it’s a providential sort of call for justice, and we don’t like the violence that’s being done by the slaves, nor do we like the violence being done on the slaves. You should, if you love your children, you should pay attention, white America. That’s as close as anyone can get, really, to advocating or using Saint-Domingue in the African American community. Otherwise it’s a third rail.

JM: Yeah, it’s such a powerful pamphlet, I wish that people were taught it in high school.

JAD: Yeah, yeah.

JM: I think we’re nearing the end of our time, but I wonder if… we come to these projects and sometimes, by the time we get to the end, we… realize things that we had not thought of at the start, or we kind of get this to a new place, in our understanding either of our topic narrowly conceived, or just some of the broader strokes of history that we’re engaged with. So I’m wondering what that might be for you.

JAD: Gosh… it’s been so long since I worked on this book… [Laughs] that what I thought at the beginning is opaque to me. But I think what I’ve come to through this is a greater appreciation, in a way, for politics, but not high politics, but the politics… or maybe better said, the contingencies of politics, how things… what we do as historians is we try to find patterns, we try to use the temporal perspective we have from standing so far away from our subjects to see patterns, to see moments of continuity and moments of change. So, yeah, the same thing we talked about earlier about the Cold War era, there’s various things that stand behind our efforts to make those patterns that have a lot to do with us, even more than it has to do with our subjects. I don’t know why, but I feel like our political moment is making us sift ever more finely for moments of contingency, for unintended consequences, for little moments of change that have reverberations and urgent tugs in ways that people hadn’t anticipated, or even understood at the time. So it’s only fueled my interest and my passion for sifting through these little moments with their big reverberations, and trying to see how they all fit together in some way. I don’t know what that says about me, or us in the Trump era. Maybe it’s that I’m alone in my office too much. [Laughs]

JM: [Laughs]

JAD: Which is probably true. But it says something. [Laughs]

JM: Great. Well, thank you so much.

JAD: Yeah, this has been great, I really appreciate your time.