Our Haitian Obligation

I recently discovered a fascinating historical tidbit, from one of my online courses: the US owes a great debt to Haiti, for what its people did to stand up to Napoleon's superior forces in 1803. Here's how it came about.

After the USA won its war of independence from Britain (some 20 years earlier), the Americans were no longer confined to the East Coast. They began to expand westward across the Appalachian Mountains, into Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Rich farmland awaited them in these new territories. Their challenge was to get their agricultural products back to the newly independent states along the coast. The mountains were too formidable a barrier to carry all that produce over them and there were no roads. The solution was to float the goods down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, load it on ships and sail back up the coast to the original 13 states. This route depended on the agreeableness of Spain, who controlled New Orleans at the time. Spain was agreeable. The US prospered.

Another, much greater barrier than the Appalachians, however, loomed in the mind of Napoleon Bonaparte, who was feeling his military oats in Europe at the time. He was smarting from the revolt of Haitian slaves, who in the 1790s had booted out the French and had been governing themselves quite well, thank you. Haiti and the other Caribbean islands were very prosperous at the time, from their sugar plantations, and Europe's sweet tooth wanted more. Besides losing Haiti, the French had lost most all of its territory in North America to England several decades earlier.

Napoleon was determined to reassert France's presence in the Americas. His plan: send a large armada across the Atlantic, recapture Haiti, occupy New Orleans, and reap the economic benefits of a French empire in the New World. Haiti and New Orleans were doomed. How could the backward Haitians manage to fend off a far larger, better-equipped French invading army? And as for the Americans, what would happen if New Orleans fell into French hands? The impact was obvious to them: American agricultural goods from the new farmlands west of the Appalachian Mountains would never get back to the original 13 states. They'd be bottled up between the mountains and a hostile French New Orleans and Louisiana Territory. The US expansion westward would slow to a trickle and America's future grandness would likely never be realized. It was a glum outlook for the fledgling American states.

The fierce Haitians met the French landing forces of tens of thousands of troops. Outgunned and out numbered, the former slaves were fighting for their very survival. Furthermore, they were enraged by a deceitful trick Napoleon had played on them, a couple of years earlier, when he feigned negotiations with their brilliant revolutionary leader, Toussaint L'Overture. Instead, Napoleon captured the former slave hero, took him back to France, and killed him. Napoleon's karma for that evil deed was to watch the former slaves of Haiti trounce his army and send send them limping back to France. The ferocity of the Haitians was aided by an epidemic of yellow fever that helped to decimate the French army.

Hooray for Haiti! But the consequences of the French humiliation were even greater for the budding United States. Defeated, Napoleon never attempted to capture New Orleans. America's westward expansion exploded. In another couple of years Thomas Jefferson would purchase New Orleans and all of the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi River from France for a bargain. So how is it that France came to acquire Louisiana from Spain, in the meantime? Spain, hurting for cash and seeing its American empire begin to crumble, had sold the territory to France, who then sold it to Jefferson, when Napoleon's subsequent martial adventures stalled in Europe and Russia, and he needed the cash.

So there you have it: our American debt to the former slaves of Haiti. While we Americans headed west and became evermore powerful, Haiti was later doomed to fall back under French influence, when (in order to acquire French recognition of Haitian independence) Haiti was saddled with a monetary debt that required over half a century to repay. Ironically, rather than acknowledge our “freedom-to-expand” debt to Haiti, the US played a significant role in the subsequent exploitation of that Caribbean island. In 1915 US marines landed in Haiti to protect American business interests there. It was just one more example of US interference in the Americas. Our debt to the Haitian people remains unpaid.