In her 1990 Presidential Address to the American Political Science Association, Judith Shklar provocatively argued that instead of “being uniformly liberal,” the history of U.S. political thought is exceedingly diverse, and that by attending to this diversity scholars might better “understand the development of political science and the institutions it reflects.” Footnote 1 Shklar hoped that reviving a pluralistic commitment to and appreciation of different forms of political thinking would give U.S. political theory a more central place in the discipline. One way of recovering the diversity of U.S. political ideas, for Shklar, is by refusing the assumption that they have been “hermetically sealed off” from broader currents of foreign and global political thought. Shklar argued that “on close examination American political thought is not, in fact, just our own … Isolating it in order to illuminate its peculiarities is bound to reduce it to charmless uniformity.” Footnote 2 Although this was a minor aspect of her commentary, she implied that the dominance and uniformity of U.S. liberal theory is partially an artifact of scholarly approaches that fail to attend to the constitutive influence of transnational forces.
Yet despite her call for greater diversity, Shklar partly exemplifies the very problem she warns against. Her admission that U.S. political thinking is not entirely distinctive notwithstanding, Shklar isolates a number of unique peculiarities. Specifically, the “prevalence of chattel slavery long after it had disappeared in the rest of the European world … contributed to distinguishing American political thought from its cultural neighbors.” Footnote 3 The notion that race is a peculiarly U.S. problem not only serves to absolve Europe’s role in the Atlantic slave trade and construction of modern racism, it also casts slavery and racial domination as national rather than global institutions. By treating slavery as exceptional, Shklar quarantines U.S. political thought and development from transnational dynamics.
The problem becomes especially apparent when considering the increasing attention scholars have paid to African American political thought. Transnational approaches are especially useful in the study of African American thought, which, as Paul Gilroy reminds us, is inherently diasporic and constituted through the transnational commodity flows of the Atlantic slave trade and its legacies of forced migration. Footnote 4 But despite greater attention to African American thinkers, scholars still largely frame their endeavor in reference to the geopolitical boundaries of the U.S. nation-state, thereby ignoring the transnational and diasporic dynamics of black politics. Footnote 5 And despite the fact that slavery was an international institution, the study of African American political ideas remains isolated within nation-centered frameworks. Although leading scholars in history and American Studies have usefully applied the “transnational turn” to the study of U.S. politics and culture in a global age, political theorists and historically-minded political scientists have been quite reluctant to embrace transnational perspectives. Footnote 6
In recent years, the transnational turn has come to characterize a plethora of different approaches that reject the nation-state and interstate system as the organizing framework of analysis: trans-Atlantic, borderlands, hemispheric, trans-Pacific, and so forth. Footnote 7 Such approaches share a focus on the transnational circulation of ideas and culture across and through national contexts. The prefix trans—meaning “to bear across” and “to change”—“denotes both moving through space and across lines, as well as changing the nature of something.” Footnote 8 The utility of transnational approaches is in highlighting how ideological and institutional change occur not just through time but across space as ideational and institutional traditions travel through different spatial and geographic contexts. I thus take a different (though not necessarily opposed) approach from recent comparative political theory analyses of American political ideas and institutions. Joshua Simon, for instance, employs comparative methodologies to isolate the distinct ways that political ideas influenced nation-state building in North and South America, allowing him to highlight the contingency of economic and political development. Footnote 9 Conversely, I seek less to compare and contrast discrete currents of political thinking than to attend to the transnational circulation of political ideas and practices. Distinct from comparative political theory, the transnational turn emphasizes how cross-national dynamics that exceed national boundaries shape the development of political ideas within a given nation.
To uncover the transnational dynamics of African American political thought, I use the notion of a “problem space” as a way of understanding and analyzing the role of transnational influences. Arising from what R.G. Collingwood has called “the logic of question and answer,” the notion of a “problem-space” refers to “an ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs.” Footnote 10 For Collingwood, the truth of a political idea is not uncovered as an abstract philosophical proposition but through attention to the discursive context or “problem-space” into which a specific argument intervenes. Footnote 11 To understand the answers that political thinkers pose, one must first understand the questions with which they are grappling.
Yet what is often taken for granted in such approaches is the tacit assumption that problem-spaces correspond to discrete political units like the nation-state, city-state, or empire-state. While it is clear that problem-spaces have temporal dimensions insofar as they are intelligible only within specific historical contexts, less acknowledged is that they also have spatial dimensions—geographic coordinates within which ideological questions have relevance as political problems. For most of modern political thought, problem-spaces have been equated in their spatial dimension with nation-states. To think about problem-spaces transnationally is to think about how discursive contexts of ideological conflict not only move beyond the confines of nation-states but also cut across them in key ways. It is only by accepting the assumption that problem-spaces seamlessly map onto geo-political borders that the United States can serve as the stable referent for the body of theoretical knowledge we call “American political thought.” Footnote 12 The consequence is that alternative traditions of thought in the Americas—e.g., Caribbean traditions—are cast as irrelevant to broader questions of American political thinking.
I seek to complicate nation-centered approaches by using the transnational turn to illustrate how African American political thought is constituted through cross-national flows of culture, capital, and power that transverse national boundaries. I trace how an influential cohort of abolitionists in the antebellum United States looked to the Haitian Revolution as a model for the overthrow of slavery. Instead of viewing racial emancipation as contained within the theoretical legacy of the U.S. Revolution, these radical abolitionists saw it as a transnational project that was equally indebted to the slave revolt of Saint-Domingue. Footnote 13 Rather than the steady extension of universal U.S. principles to enslaved peoples, influential black abolitionists in the nineteenth century questioned the logic of “American universalism” Footnote 14 and turned to Haitian political thought and practice as a way of understanding the unique problems that enslavement posed to democratic self-government. In this way, I build on a growing literature that has highlighted, despite its disavowal in Western political thought, the centrality of the Haitian Revolution to the making of the modern world. Footnote 15 I show how central themes in U.S. abolitionist thought have emerged in relation to the Haitian struggle for racial emancipation, thereby decentering the nation-state as the organizing unit of African American political thought.
My argument, then, is that radical abolitionists operated in the same ideological problem-space as the Haitian Revolution and thus adopted a specific model of political revolution as much indebted to the Haitian rebels as Anglo-American models of anti-colonial revolt. I begin by engaging C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins to show how Haitian revolutionary thought developed through the transnational circulation of French republicanism. For James, the Haitian revolutionaries did not simply adopt pre-formed republican principles from the French precedent, but instead raised those principles to a higher, universal level by integrating them with their distinct experiences as slaves. The subsequent three sections extend this analysis to the abolitionism of David Walker, James Theodore Holly, and Frederick Douglass in order to show how they turned to Haitian models of slave revolt as a way of grappling with the unique dilemma enslavement and emancipation posed to black self-government. Footnote 16
For Walker, the Haitian Revolution provided a means of dealing with the problem of black ignorance in which the psychological degradation of racial ideology resulted in an internalized inferior status in slaves, thereby preventing the possibility of collective slave revolt. Similarly, Holly utilized the Haitian model to awaken slaves and freedmen to their collective, democratic capacities. Both Holly and Douglass then drew an explicit contrast between the Haitian Revolution and the U.S. Revolution. While the latter involved the overthrow of imperial power by settler colonials in order to establish free, democratic institutions, the former required an assault on ideological systems of racial inferiority and psychological despotism in order to constitute the collective agency of slaves. Similar to James’s account of the Haitian Revolution, this distinction suggests that struggles for egalitarian racial transformations in the U.S. cannot be understood solely with reference to national traditions of political thought.
I close by exploring the historical-interpretive and normative implications of the transnational turn for the study of American racial orders. On an interpretive and historical level, the transnational turn urges scholars of U.S. politics to loosen rigid distinctions between domestic and international politics and pay attention to the hemispheric and global dimensions of racial order. On a normative and theoretical level, attention to the transnational influence of the Haitian Revolution on U.S. abolitionism foregrounds radical modes of black agency and avenues of racial transformation that exceed the limitations of liberal frameworks of civil rights.
Jacobinism’s Atlantic Crossings
Historians of various stripes first developed transnational approaches to examine the Atlantic Ocean as a political and historical space distinct from singular national histories. In this effort, David Armitage has developed a conception of trans-Atlantic history, which centers on how the “circulatory system of the Atlantic created links between regions and peoples formerly kept distinct,” which in turn allows for the construction of comparisons that are concrete and connected rather than arbitrary and coincidental. Footnote 17 Rather than a barrier that hindered exchange, the Atlantic served as a conduit that facilitated the cross-fertilization of ideas and co-construction of national political traditions.
Trans-Atlantic history has particular resonance in black political thought where, as Paul Gilroy has shown, the space of the Atlantic operates as a zone of cultural exchange. By exploring the cultural formation of “the Black Atlantic,” Gilory rejects essentialist and nationalist frameworks of black political thinking in favor of more heterogeneous articulations of blackness. Indicative of the materialist bent of transnational perspectives, the central metaphor of the Black Atlantic is “the image of the ship,” which cues attention to the commercial conduits of the Atlantic slave trade that facilitated the circulation of black culture across national borders. Footnote 18 Insofar as they are focused on the cross-national transmission of ideas, transnational approaches necessarily embrace a materialist perspective that requires attention to the global flows—e.g., Indian removal trails, slave ships, settler colonies, and trade routes—through which political discourses circulate. While the disciplines of history and cultural studies have made great use of transnational frameworks, political theorists still largely abide by “the unthinking assumption that [political traditions] always flow into patterns congruent with the borders of essentially homogenous nation states.” Footnote 19
Perhaps one of the most compelling works of black transnational thought is C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938). A persistent theme in James’ political thinking was his conviction that in order to overcome racist regimes of dehumanization, blacks must constitute themselves as a political constituency through anti-colonial resistance. For James, the capacity of oppressed peoples for self-transformation was the primary motor of historical change. Footnote 20 James was especially concerned with drawing attention to the world-historical role blacks played in shaping modern political order. In his 1939 essay, “Revolution and the Negro,” he debunked the myth of the “docile Negro” by not only documenting the history of political revolt in the black diaspora but also by foregrounding “the tremendous role played by Negroes in the transformation of Western civilization from feudalism to capitalism,” placing emphasis on the American Civil War and the Haitian Revolution. Footnote 21 In both events, James saw the primary features of modern politics cohere around an emphasis on human rights, racial equality, and universal emancipation. In the preface to the first edition of The Black Jacobins, he emphasized the process of self-actualization that led to these advances: “The transformation of slaves, trembling in hundreds before a single white man, into a people able to organize themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day, is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement.” Footnote 22
In accounting for this revolutionary struggle, James explores how black slaves appropriated French revolutionary discourse in order to overthrow the plantation economy of the French colony of Saint-Domingue. James writes of the leader of the War of Independence that “Toussaint had the advantage of liberty and equality, the slogans of the [French] revolution. They were great weapons in an age of slaves, but weapons must be used and he used them with a fencer’s finesse and skill.” Footnote 23 James’s argument here indicates that revolutionary discourse in France did not contain an inherently anti-slavery position. He recounts how Toussaint developed his rhetorical skill by reading the Abbé Raynal’s famous indictment of slavery and prophecy of slave revolt in the West Indies in A History of the Two Indies (1770). Footnote 24 Along with an historical account of European colonization, Raynal provided a trenchant critique of slavery and a vindication of republican ideals. Prior to Raynal, French republicanism offered an anemic critique of slavery that failed to link the abolition of slavery to slave revolt. Raynal, however, “called boldly for a slave revolution with a passionate conviction that it was bound to come some day and relieve Africa and Africans.” Footnote 25 He further hoped a “courageous chief … who shall have reestablished the rights of the human race.” Footnote 26 Inspired by these words, Toussaint L’Ouverture, his last name meaning “opening,” sought precisely that, a revolutionary rupture in history in which slaves would achieve emancipation by constituting themselves as a self-governing people.
James, however, does not see the radicalization of French republicanism as a wholesale adoption. Rather, he emphasizes how Jacobin radicalism blended with the creolized-African elements of plantation culture. James places Toussaint and other insurgents within a Kreyol tradition of slave revolt stretching back to the maroon chief Mackandal, who used Voodoo potions to poison and terrorize the planter elite, constituting one of the first attempts at organized slave revolt. Footnote 27 This tradition of organized slave revolt lingered in plantation culture until August 22, 1791, when the Voodoo priest Boukman convened insurgents and leaders of the revolt in the woods of Bois Caïman outside Le Cap. To commence the revolt, Boukman repeated a Voodoo prayer in Kreyol, which ended with a universal vision of freedom expressed through a militant confrontation with white culture: “Throw away the symbol of the god of the white who has often caused us to weep, and listen to the voice of liberty, which speaks in the hearts of us all.” Footnote 28 While slave insurgents employed the discourse of the rights of man and citizen to elevate their struggle, they also supplemented it with creolized-African traditions and their unique experiences as slaves. Their commitment to universal liberty was thus articulated not just through the imported language of Enlightenment universalism but more forcefully in the Kreyol saying tou moun se moun, roughly meaning “everyone is a person,” which was drawn from the Bantu idea of ubuntu in which humanity is defined in terms of connectivity and relationality. Footnote 29 Rather than a complete rejection or adoption of Enlightenment values, Haitian slaves fostered a transcultural vision of human equality that integrated both European and creolized-African traditions.
James further contests that the Haitian insurgents more faithfully fulfilled French revolutionary ideals than Frenchmen themselves. Even after the War of Independence began after Napoleon reinstated slavery in 1802, Haitian rebels continued to view their struggle in terms of French revolutionary discourse. James reports that on certain nights soldiers in the French Army “heard the blacks in the fortress singing the Marseillaise … and the other revolutionary songs.” Footnote 30 Although the insurgents appropriated French revolutionary culture, they also transformed that culture to embrace an emancipatory commitment to universal human rights. James writes that “the liberty and equality which these blacks acclaimed as they went into battle meant far more to them than the same words in the mouths of the French.” Footnote 31 The extension of freedom to slaves was by no means immanent within the logic of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. It was the product of the circulation of republican discourse back and forth between colony and metropolis. The Haitian Revolution did not fulfill the inherent emancipatory logic of the French Revolution but rather constituted new emancipatory ideals through the re-signification of metropolitan republican discourse in colonial contexts. Footnote 32
The revolutionary force of black republicanism forged in Haiti extended beyond the former French colony and left an enduring imprint on the U.S. political imagination. Although the precise mechanisms of theoretical diffusion are difficult to delineate, it is clear that Haitian revolutionary thought diffused broadly enough to shape U.S. abolitionist thought in the nineteenth century. Denmark Vesey, a freedman who plotted a Charleston slave revolt in 1822, was held as a slave in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the 1780s before he traveled to the United States and attained his freedom. Vesey, it is widely noted, was deeply influenced by the Haitian Revolution and sought to model a slave revolt in the United States on the Haitian precedent. One co-conspirator in Vesey’s trial had remarked that he “was in the habit of reading to me all the passages in the newspapers that related to St. Domingo, and apparently every pamphlet he could lay his hands on that had any connection with slavery.” Footnote 33 Tellingly, white southerners and black insurgents alike understood slave revolt in terms of the transnational diffusion of French republicanism via Haiti. After Vesey’s conspiracy was uncovered, Charleston editor Edwin Holland proclaimed, “Our Negroes are truly the Jacobins of this country.” Footnote 34
The Black American Jacobins
Viewed in transnational perspective, we see that a model of revolution derived from the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue was central to the politics of radical abolition. Nowhere is this more evident than in considering the most influential abolitionist tract written in the nineteenth century—David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together With a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and very Expressly to Those of the United States of America (1830). Although little is known about his early life, Walker did have intellectual exposure to the Haitian Revolution. He was born in North Carolina and early in his adult life moved to Charleston where he joined the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Beyond freed blacks, over half of the congregation of Emanuel AME was composed of slaves. The church was a hotbed of insurrectionary activity. Over one quarter of the 131 people tried for involvement in Vesey’s conspiracy were enrolled or former members of the AME church. Although no direct evidence links Walker to Vesey, the similar positions both men took regarding the role of revolutionary violence in abolitionist struggles strongly suggests that Vesey’s views influenced Walker. Footnote 35 During his trial, Vesey made a passionate plea for black unity: “We must unite together as the Santo Domingo people did … We were fully able to conquer the whites, if we were only unanimous and courageous as the Santo Domingo people were.” Footnote 36 The primary concern of Vesey was how to cultivate the political capacities of slaves as a political constituency capable of overthrowing the slave system.
Walker similarly understood the abolition of slavery in revolutionary terms. He urged freed and enslaved blacks to resist slavery and voice their opposition to oppression “not only in one or two cities, but one continual cry would be raised in all parts of this confederacy, and would cease only with the complete overthrow of the system of slavery, in every part of the country.” Footnote 37 Walker’s understanding of slave insurrection, however, cannot be understood solely with reference to U.S. models of national independence. In his attempt to cultivate a black constituency capable of overthrowing racial slavery, Walker also drew on the Haitian model. Footnote 38
Such an understanding of Walker’s thought first emerges by considering the transnational audience of the Appeal. Walker addresses his appeal “to the coloured citizens of the world,” not just “to those of the United States of America.” While he zeroes in on U.S. structures of injustice, he addresses a transnational constituency. For Walker, slavery was less a national problem than an institution of what Charles Mills calls “global white supremacy” where systems of racial oppression do not neatly coincide with national boundaries. Footnote 39 The struggle against slavery as a global institution required a radical black constituency that was transnational in scope. In addressing “the colored citizens of the world,” Walker sought to constitute a transnational black citizenry—not simply an independent black nation but a transnational public sphere. Footnote 40 For Walker, the rebellion of French and American slaves were enchained events in a broader process of global racial emancipation.
In light of the transnational scope of Walker’s address, we can better understand his brief but significant invocations of Haiti. Although he opposed colonization schemes to send freed slaves to foreign colonies—insisting that “this country is as much ours as it is the whites”—Walker implored blacks that if they had to leave, “go to our brethren, the Haytians, who, according to their word, are bound to protect and comfort us.” In the preamble, Walker also addressed his appeal to “my dearly beloved Brethren and Fellow Citizens,” suggesting that the fraternal ties connecting Haitians and U.S. blacks are civic bonds of mutual obligation that span national divisions rather than pre-political familial ties. Footnote 41 This transnational sense derived from the legacy of Haitian constitutionalism. When he claimed that Haitians are “bound to protect and comfort us,” Walker was referring to Article 44 of the 1816 revisions of the Haitian Constitution initiated by President Alexandre Pétion, which stated that “all Africans and Indians, and those of their blood, born in the colonies or in foreign countries, who come to reside in the Republic will be recognized as Haitians.” Footnote 42 After one year of residence, the Constitution granted citizenship to anyone of African or Amerindian descent, making citizenship a transnational civic status. More than a refuge for U.S. blacks, Haiti was a model of transnational citizenship. By granting civic rights to those who were not in fact citizens on a national level, the Haitian Constitution inserted universal claims of racial equality into the dominant system of global white supremacy.
Beyond his admiration of Haitian constitutionalism as a model of transnational solidarity, Walker turned to Haiti with two specific aims. First, he saw in Haiti a prophetic warning of God’s divine justice. In a fiery and polemical passage, Walker wrote that the “whites want slaves, and want us for their slaves, but some of them will curse the day they ever saw us. As true as the sun ever shone in its meridian splendor, my colour will root some of them out of the very face of the earth … Hayti, the glory of the blacks and terror of tyrants, is enough to convince the most avaricious and stupid of wretches.” Footnote 43 In a prophetic mode of rhetoric, Walker invoked Haiti as an example of divine violence that will be showered upon whites if they do not repent and demolish the slave system. Cueing attention to the horror of slave revolt in the white mind, Walker intimated that the revolutionary force driving colonial revolt in Saint-Domingue will be brought to the United States. Through prophetic threats of divine retribution, he implored his white audience to join in the cause of righteousness and resist slavery. “And I am awfully afraid that pride, prejudice, avarice and blood, will, before long prove the final ruin of this happy republic, or land of liberty!!! O Americans! Americans!! I call God—I call angels—I call men, to witness, that your DESTRUCTION is at hand, and will be speedily consummated unless you REPENT.” Footnote 44 Repentance is not a simple confession of one’s sins; it is an active commitment to human emancipation. In urging repentance, Walker did not appeal to the hearts and minds of enslavers through moral suasion, but rather to the threat of divine retribution exemplified by Haiti, “the terror of tyrants.”
The second (and more central) reason that Walker turned to Haiti was the specific problem that enslavement posed the realization of the collective agency of the enslaved. Haiti—“the glory of the blacks”—represented an exemplary model of the cultivation of black political capacities as a precondition for the overthrow of slavery. But to understand the significance of the Haitian Revolution on this front one must first grapple with the unique psychological obstacles that enslavement placed in the way of racial emancipation. Through a comparative study of slavery, Walker asserted in Article I that racial slaves are “the most wretched, degraded, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began, and that white Americans having reduced us to the wretched state of slavery, treat us in that condition more cruel … than any heathen nation did any people whom it has reduced to our condition.” Footnote 45 To make this point, Walker compared ancient to modern racial slavery. By arguing that the psychological degradation of modern racial slavery poses a different set of obstacles to emancipation than ancient slavery, Walker distinguished between the two as entirely different forms of oppression.
For instance, although the Israelites were physically enchained and subjected to insufferable toil, “[not] a verse can be found, which maintains, that Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the human family.” Citing Jefferson’s assertion that African slaves descended “originally from the tribes of Monkeys or Orang-Outangs,” he identified ideologies of dehumanization and animalization as the central pillars of modern slavery. Footnote 46 Similarly, the lack of de-humanizing racial distinctions in Roman slavery allowed slaves to not only obtain their freedom but to “rise to the greatest eminence in the State.” Footnote 47 The severity of modern racial slavery is not simply in the degree of physical violence. It is in the production of racial subjectivity marked by mental degradation. Racial slavery was a distinct form of oppression that resulted in the internalization of an inferiority complex among slaves, obstructing black capacities for political action. Key to Walker’s comparative analysis of slavery was his contention that modern racial ideology produced a psychic state of ignorance in the consciousness of slaves.
In dealing with the central problem of black ignorance in Article II, Walker turned to the Carthaginians under Hannibal in the Second Punic Wars and the Haitians as models of African people coming to the realization of their collective agency in opposition to the oppression of European imperial power. Walker writes, “O my suffering brethren! Remember the divisions and consequent sufferings of Carthage and Haiti.” Footnote 48 In the case of Carthage, Walker praised Hannibal, “that mighty son of Africa,” for his leadership in confronting “the white Romans.” The Carthaginians failed, however, because they were “dis-united, as the coloured people are now, in the United States of America, the reason our natural enemies are enabled to keep their feet on our throats.” In contrast, Walker invoked the Haitian experience as a positive example of blacks achieving racial solidarity and overcoming the psychological obstacles to freedom posed by the internalization of racial ideologies of black servility and ignorance. Haiti proved to blacks that “groveling servile and abject submission to the lash of tyrants … are not the natural elements of the blacks, as the [U.S.] Americans try to make us believe.” Footnote 49
Walker thus directed his prophetic invocation of Haiti not just at the oppression of whites but also at the ignorance and passivity of blacks. He addressed “all coloured men, women and children who are not too deceitful, abject, and servile to resist the cruelties and murders inflicted upon us by the white slaveholders.” Footnote 50 Ignorance was not merely a failure of judgment but more precisely a failure of action, a form of anti-republican passivity. In classical Jacobin fashion, Walker implicated black ignorance in reinforcing the slave system. By remaining “ignorant and miserable,” he implied that slaves had “joined in with our oppressors.” Footnote 51 To accept one’s duty to resist slavery is to affirm one’s role as an instrument of God in delivering divine justice. Yet there is a radical openness in Walker’s invocation of divine violence precisely because he did not presume that oppressed peoples are already constituted as subjects capable of fulfilling their role as instruments of God.
Stephen Marshall has provocatively suggested that “Walker’s political desire was to be a lawgiver, one who destroys old laws and legislates new ones to found a new people.” Footnote 52 If Walker played the role of the lawgiver as Marshall asserts, he self-consciously stepped into the problem-space outlined by Rousseau in Book II of On the Social Contract. There Rousseau famously wrote of the paradox of the self-constitution of the people: “For an emerging people to be capable of appreciating the sound maxims of politics and to follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause. The social spirit which ought to be the work of the institution would have to preside over the institution itself.” Footnote 53 The paradox was that the creation of good laws depends upon good citizens, but that citizens can only become good by living in a system of good laws. To dissolve the paradox, Rousseau introduced the figure of the lawgiver who stands above and apart from “the people” in order to establish the initial laws that lay the precondition for a just body politic.
Walker recast Rousseau’s paradox as a racial problematic. To overthrow racial slavery, enslaved Africans must obtain certain political capacities, but it is precisely the institution of racial slavery that prevents them from fully cultivating such capacities. Yet Walker does not so much give slaves a new set of laws, as Marshall argues, as he did utilize his rhetorical skill in order to cultivate the political capacities of oppressed peoples so that they might constitute their own laws and sense of political peoplehood. In a series of self-consciously productive speech-acts, he sought not to describe the capacities of African slaves for revolutionary action but to constitute a radical constituency who would perform active citizenship despite the dehumanizing racial discourses of planter republicans like Jefferson. Footnote 54 He thus refuted Jefferson’s arguments about black inferiority not through the force of the better argument, but through the self-assertion of black capacities for political action. As if to produce this radical black constituency through rhetorical appeal, he wrote, “For my part, I am glad that Mr. Jefferson has advanced his position for your sake; for you will either have to contradict or confirm him by your own actions.” Footnote 55
In order to solve this racial problematic, Walker implored his audience to read “the history particularly of Hayti, and see how they were butchered by the whites, and do you take warning.” Footnote 56 He turned to Haiti not simply because it was the only model of an independent black nation, but because it was the most forceful example of modern-racial slaves developing their collective capacities for republican citizenship in opposition to racial ideologies of animalization. Much more than a process of national independence, Haiti provided a model by which slaves achieved freedom through the self-actualization of their basic humanity. Haitian slaves constituted themselves as a self-governing people through the revolutionary overthrow not just of economic exploitation but also of psychological de-humanization. Walker thus saw slave revolt as constitutive rather than indicative of the basic humanity and political peoplehood of slaves. Only through collective revolt against epistemological assumptions of black inhumanity at the center of the plantation system can slaves embrace “the destruction of [their] animal existence.” Footnote 57
Although he does briefly invoke the Declaration of Independence at the end, the Appeal cannot be understood as exclusively or even primarily operating within the logic of the U.S. revolutionary tradition precisely because that tradition did not address the central problem of black transnational thought, i.e., black ignorance. The legacy of the U.S. Revolution and the Declaration of Independence occupy an ambiguous position in Walker’s Appeal. Sean Wilentz has argued that despite his radical critique of Jefferson, Walker’s Appeal “still clung to [U.S.] political principles and the possibility that they might be salvaged from racial oppression. Although Walker condemned Jefferson, he also regarded the Declaration, with its assertion that all men are created equal, as a model of human and political rights.” Footnote 58 Wilentz’s view, while not necessarily wrong, casts too much aside. Although he viewed abolition as occurring partially within the legacy of the Declaration of Independence, it would be a mistake to reduce the role of revolution in Walker’s thought solely to the Anglo-American model of anti-colonial revolt at the expense of the Haitian model of slave revolt.
Toward the conclusion of his Appeal in Article IV, Walker turned for the first time to the Declaration of Independence. Shifting his tone and signaling that he is speaking to his white rather than black audience, he recited the preamble to the Declaration almost in full. Walker enjoined his white audience to compare “your own language above, extracted from your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us—men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation!!!” He went on to say, “Now Americans! I ask you candidly, was your sufferings [sic] under Great Britain, one hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you?” Footnote 59 A casual reading might suggest that Walker intended to establish a qualitative equivalence (but difference in degree) between colonial oppression under the British Empire and racial slavery in order to justify slave insurrection. By establishing links between the two forms of oppression, Walker argued for the extension of the right to revolution outlined in the Declaration of Independence to the overthrow of masters by slaves. The difference in degree between the types of oppression—the immense gravity of racial slavery compared to colonial dependency—only bolsters the legitimacy of slave revolt.
Considered in light of the racial problematic outlined above, however, his comparison of the two forms of oppression does not establish simply a difference in degree, but qualitatively distinct types of oppression. Slave revolt cannot be understood within the terms of Anglo-American revolt as a problem of national independence. Evident in Walker’s comparative analysis of ancient and modern racial slavery, far more than an attempt to alter or abolish political institutions, the primary problem of slave revolt was contending with the entrenched system of psychological despotism by which slaves internalize ideologies of inferiority, which in turn threaten the cultivation of republican civic capacities. Walker thus saw the Haitian revolutionary tradition as responding to a distinct set of problems that his invocation of the Declaration of Independence did not.
Vindicating the Haitian Revolution
Similar to Walker, the Episcopalian Bishop James Theodore Holly cast the Haitian Revolution as the primary piece of evidence in broader claims for black self-government in his remarkable lecture titled, A Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self-Government and Civilized Progress, as Demonstrated by Historical Events of the Haytian Revolution (1857). In Silencing the Past, the late anthropologist Michel-Rolp Trouillot provocatively characterized the Haitian Revolution as a “non-event.” Trouillot wrote that the “concrete possibility of [slave] rebellion flourishing into a revolution and a modern black state was … part of the unthinkable.” Footnote 60 What Trouillot meant was not simply that historical writers were unaware that the Revolution happened, but that it was not recognizable as a political event within the categories of Euro-American historical discourse. The primary obstacle was the underlying assumption in Enlightenment discourse that because enslaved Africans did not have consciousness of freedom they lacked the requisite political capacities for revolution. Because the Haitian Revolution challenged the basic ontological assumptions of Western thought about the humanity of enslaved Africans, slave revolt comprised a set of “unthinkable facts.” Footnote 61
Against these silencing tendencies in historical discourse, black radicals in the antebellum period delivered lectures on the Haitian Revolution in an attempt to recuperate its legacy and relevance for abolitionist struggles. Footnote 62 The presence of a black revolutionary tradition unsettled the U.S. Revolutionary imaginary. For whites, to the extent that they acknowledged it at all, the carnage of the Revolution provided evidence against black capacities for self-government. Like James, Holly corrected these distortions by bringing about a new understanding of the Haitian revolution as a signature moment in the history of racial emancipation.
The first thing to note about Holly’s lecture is that he labels it “a vindication,” embarking on a well-worn path of political argumentation best represented by Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Yet in important respects Holly departed from the conventions of Wollstonecraft’s treatises. Writing within a natural rights tradition, Wollstonecraft defended rights that political subjects do in fact possess by virtue of natural law even if they aren’t honored by government. Footnote 63 In calling his lecture a vindication of capacities rather than rights, Holly diverted from Wollstonecraft. More than a defense of rights that one passively possesses, Holly demonstrated black potential for revolutionary action through a theoretically-informed historical narrative of the Haitian Revolution. To vindicate black capacities for political action is not simply to describe and rhetorically justify the existence of certain political capabilities. It is to constitute those capacities as such through the radical self-assertion of black freedom in opposition to the economic, political, and psychological architecture of racial bondage.
Holly placed slave insurgency outside the legacy of the U.S. Revolution by constructing a counter-hegemonic black revolutionary tradition: “the Haytian Revolution is … the grandest political event of this or any other age. In weighty causes, and wondrous and momentous features, it surpasses the American Revolution, in an incomparable degree.” Footnote 64 He thus pushed Walker’s contention that racial slavery represents the most brutal form of oppression in the world to encapsulate a bolder position: the Haitian Revolution represented the most significant moment in the development of human emancipation. In doing so, he highlighted two different models of colonial revolt at work in the Haitian and U.S. Revolutions. The latter was “only the revolt of a people already comparatively free, independent, and highly enlightened.” Footnote 65 The former evinced an entirely different dynamic: “A race of almost dehumanized men—made so by an oppressive slavery of three centuries—arose from their slumber of ages, and regressed their own [unparalleled] wrongs with a terrible hand in the name of God and humanity.” Footnote 66 While English colonists already had developed political capacities and an awareness of liberty that enabled revolt, African slaves had been dehumanized to such an extent that they lost sight of their own political power and historical agency.
What was so grand about the Haitian Revolution was the destruction of slavery not as just as an economic system of bondage but as a discursive system aimed at the production of racial subjectivity. Footnote 67 In order to become free, slaves first had to throw off the yoke not just of physical bondage but of psychological bondage. The problem-space of the Haitian Revolution involved more than anti-colonial revolt against imperial authority with the aim of creating new democratic institutions. Based on the racial ideology of slavery, “the great mass of the Caucasian race still deem the negro as entirely destitute of those qualities, on which they selfishly predicate their own superiority … And the result is, that many of the race themselves, are almost persuaded that they are a brood of inferior beings.” Footnote 68 The problem of slave revolt involved the psychological internalization of inferior status. Without first overthrowing the subjective bondage of racial ideology, slaves would be unable to constitute themselves as a self-governing people.
More than a theoretical justification of revolutionary action, Holly aimed to constitute a revolutionary constituency by awakening the black masses to the power of their own agency. By witnessing heroic acts of revolutionary leaders, slaves and freed blacks would be stirred to revolutionary action and develop a new sense of political identity and awareness of their power. Holly writes, “I wish to do all in my power to inflame the latent embers of self-respect, that the cruelty and injustice of our oppressors, have nearly extinguished in our bosoms, during the midnight chill of centuries, that we have clanked the galling chains of slavery.” Footnote 69 Holly sought to inspire a sense of dignity in African Americans not by the force of the better argument but through the public demonstration of revolutionary history. The rhetorical form of the vindication employed by Holly sought not to prove the capacities of a pre-existing constituency but to constitute a radical black constituency as such.
The bulk of Holly’s lecture involved historical description of the actions of the Haitian insurgents so as to prove their democratic capacities. Although the evidence Holly fostered is too much to fully cover, a few points stand out. He explained how “the cosmopolitan theories of the French philosophers” were first brought to Saint-Domingue by white colonists who were initially excluded from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. “The white colonists of St. Domingo,” Holly writes, “like our liberty loving and democratic fellow citizens of the United States, never meant to include this despised race, in their glowing dreams of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” Footnote 70 The brilliance of the slave insurgents was in seizing the rhetoric presented by the French Revolution in order to turn it against white colonists. While white colonists immediately took control of French revolutionary discourse in 1789, it was three years later in 1791 with Boukman’s revolt that slaves appropriated the same revolutionary ideals to foment an uprising. One would expect that they would have immediately risen up at the first cries of liberty. “But as I have said, they did no such thing; they had a conscious faith in the ultimate designs of God; and they silently waited, trusting the workings of his over-ruling Providence to bring about the final day of their deliverance.” Footnote 71 Rather than a sign of cowardice and complacency, the willingness to wait for the proper confluence of historical forces to present opportunities for revolution is evidence of profound capacities for self-government, what Holly called “stern self-possession” and “judicious self-control.” Footnote 72
Holly was not simply offering a calm philosophical argument. He was inciting radical action through the public demonstration of history. The conclusions demonstrated did not reside in the soundness of logical argument or empirical evidence. They rested in the rhetorical effect the lecture had on its audience. His purpose was not to expound historical facts for scholarly purposes. It was to “arouse [blacks] to a full consciousness of their inherent dignity.” Footnote 73 A sense of self-respect and dignity is pre-requisite for political action in the present. By witnessing the public demonstration of Haitian history, blacks in the United States would develop self-awareness of their own collective agency and continue the legacy of the Haitian Revolution: “It becomes then an important question for the negro race in America to well consider the weighty responsibility that the present exigency devolves upon them, to contribute to the continued advancement of this negro nationality of the New World until its glory and renown shall … cover the whole earth.” Footnote 74
Provincializing the American Revolution
In 1889, Frederick Douglass was appointed as a diplomatic minister and consul-general to Haiti. Although the position lasted only a year, in 1893 he accepted a position as Haiti’s official representative at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Footnote 75 At the exposition, the 400th anniversary commemorating the colonization of the Americas, Douglass delivered two speeches celebrating Haiti’s political contributions to human freedom. Rather than a commemoration of the colonization of the Americas, Douglass celebrated the 90 year anniversary of the Haitian Revolution. He wrote of Haiti, “Happily too, for her, she was the first of the New World in which the black man asserted his right to be free and was brave enough to fight for his freedom.” Footnote 76 Complicating conventional views of Douglass as a U.S. nationalist, he argued that racial emancipation owed more to Haiti than the Anglo-American revolutionary tradition. In doing so, he displaced the stable location of American liberty by emphasizing the transnational circulation of revolutionary discourse.
Recent scholarship on Douglass has emphasized the hemispheric and transnational aspects of his political thinking by placing his admiration of the Haitian Revolution in the context of long shifts over time in his views on hemispheric politics. Ranging from his support of Haitian emigration in the 1850s to his argument for the annexation of the Dominican Republic in the 1870s to his admiration of the Haitian Revolution in the 1890s, these scholars have challenged truncated accounts of Douglass as an assimilationist and integrationist thinker who sought the complete incorporation of African Americans into the U.S. political order. Juliet Hooker, for instance, has argued that Douglass turned to Latin America and the Caribbean as models of “multiracial democracy” and “composite nationality” that might help put “U.S. democracy on more racially egalitarian grounds” and thereby serve as important sources of democratic revitalization. Footnote 77
Despite these recent recoveries of Douglass’s transnational thought, a neglected dimension of his turn to the Caribbean is his distinction between the Haitian and U.S. Revolutions. Like Holly, Douglass argued that the Haitian Revolution was more significant than its North American counterpart in the development of modern freedom due to the mechanisms of psychological degradation the slave insurgents overcame: “Our American Independence was a task of tremendous proportions … But as herculean as was that task and dreadful as were the hardships and sufferings it imposed, it was nothing in its terribleness when compared with the appalling nature of the war which Haiti dared to wage for her freedom and independence.” While the men of the U.S. Revolution “had a thousand years of civilization” behind them, being members of “the ruling race of this world,” the Haitians “stood before the world as the most abject, helpless and degraded of mankind.” Footnote 78 Douglass drew a similar distinction between the two revolutionary traditions. In the U.S. Revolution, the central problem was national independence—the establishment of free democratic institutions independent from the imperial metropolis. In the Haitian model, however, the central problem was realizing the collective agency of the enslaved by overcoming racial ideologies of dehumanization and animalization.
With this distinction, Douglass aligns with Walker and Holly, which raises difficult questions concerning his views on revolution. As Neil Roberts has argued, Douglass’s romantic conception of freedom through struggle and resistance “stops short of Revolution.” Footnote 79 While Douglass advocated for individual resistance against slaveholders and war between pro- and anti-slavery forces, he generally did not advocate for collective slave revolt through revolution (i.e., the overthrow of the system and its replacement with a new set of founding principles). Given this, there seems to be little evidence that Douglass, like Walker and Holly, invoked the Haitian Revolution as a model of collective resistance against white supremacy. Nevertheless, what is important for present purposes is how he distinguished between the different logics of the Haitian and U.S. Revolutions, and furthermore how he saw the Haitian Revolution as the primary engine of modern racial emancipation. Thus, to the extent that he did see collective slave revolt in the Haitian mold as necessary to racial liberation, Douglass helps clarify key political practices and principles of the black transnational tradition.
Based on his contrast between the Haitian and U.S. Revolutions, Douglass depicted Haiti as the primary leader in the world-historical quest for racial emancipation:
She has grandly served the cause of universal human liberty. We should not forget that the freedom you and I enjoy to-day [sic]; that the freedom that eight hundred thousand colored people enjoy in the British West Indies; the freedom that has come to the colored race the world over, is largely due to the brave stand taken by the black sons of Haiti ninety years ago. When they struck for freedom … they struck for the freedom of every black man in the world.
Douglass went on to construct a pantheon of British and American abolitionists who advanced the cause of racial equality, including John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, Benjamin Lundy, Thomas Clarkson, and William Wilberforce. Although the Anglo-American abolitionists were undeniably important in achieving emancipation, “we owe incomparably more to Haiti than them all.” Footnote 80 As the first free black republic and the first nation to abolish slavery, Haiti assumed the preeminent position in the cause of universal liberty.
This superlative assertion significantly complicates conventional portraits of Douglass, largely derived from his writings on slavery in the 1850s and his famous Fourth of July speech. In that speech, Douglass called out the hypocrisy of white Americans by exposing the “national inconsistencies” between the professed principles of the Declaration and the practice of slavery. Footnote 81 In misapplying their own ideals and misreading their own founding documents, Americans have been false to the promise of their own heritage. As Nicholas Buccola has put it, “Douglass interpreted the American founding as an essentially liberal moment in human history and saw his project as an attempt to extend the liberal promises of the Founding to all people.” Footnote 82 In this interpretation, the struggle for racial equality takes place solely within the boundaries of U.S. liberalism. But like Walker and Holly, Douglass saw an immense democratic energy embodied in the “the only self-made Black Republic in the world.” Footnote 83 In his comparative history of revolution, Douglass reversed the common assumption that democratic revolution first emerged in France and America and then spread to other parts of the world by suggesting that Haiti was the “pioneer emancipator of the nineteenth century.” Footnote 84
For Douglass, the Haitian Revolution responded to a specific set of problems in transnational black politics that the U.S. Revolution did not provide answers to (precisely because it did not pose the same set of questions). Accordingly, we cannot read Douglass strictly as a liberal nationalist who saw U.S. revolutionary principles as the only path to racial equality. Douglass’s account challenges conventional Anglo-centric histories that view the emergence of racial emancipation in terms of a developmental trajectory that is entirely confined within the U.S. revolutionary tradition. According to Douglass, ideologies of racial emancipation were not products of the inherent egalitarian logic of U.S. revolutionary principles. Insofar as U.S. revolutionary ideals became universal in scope, it was partially through their syncretic fusion with Haitian political discourse.
De-Nationalizing American Racial Orders
Embracing the transnational turn has distinct implications for the study of African American political thought and racial orders in U.S. political development. Against treatments of the United States as a “racial state” dominated by a single racial order, Desmond King and Rogers Smith have rightly argued that U.S. racial politics is marked by ongoing conflict between a “white supremacist order” and a “transformative egalitarian order.” Footnote 85 They contend that until the Civil War, the United States was dominated by a pro-slavery alliance solidified by the Constitutional compromise over slavery. This dominant racial alliance was counteracted by a competing coalition that grounded its principles in “the rhetoric of the [U.S.] Revolution and … egalitarian forms of Christianity.” Footnote 86 The problem is that King and Smith locate this racial order solely within national traditions of thought, thereby ignoring how opposition to white supremacy was shaped by diasporic networks of the Black Atlantic. To the extent that racial orders are composed of distinct institutional and ideational commitments, the transformative egalitarian order in the nineteenth century was indebted to the Haitian Revolution as a source of political principles and aims. Moreover, subaltern traditions of black transnationalism and third-world anti-colonialism also sustained egalitarian racial alliances in twentieth century U.S. politics. Footnote 87
Racially transformative movements and moments in U.S. political development cannot be adequately understood with exclusive reference to national traditions of thought. Yet as the study of African American political thought has significantly grown over recent years, leading studies remain wedded to nation-centered frameworks, presenting black political thinking as entirely contained within the bounded traditions of U.S. liberalism and civic republicanism. Footnote 88 As I have shown, however, the formation of black abolitionist thought often cut across national boundaries and was transformed through the transnational circulation of egalitarian and emancipatory discourses. More recently, some scholars have embraced the transnational turn to keen effect. Melanye Price, for instance, has shown how currents of black public opinion often adopt a “global view of black oppression that connects African American oppression to that of people of African descent cross-nationally.” Footnote 89 Similarly, Alvin Tillery has shown how Pan-African ideals of black transnationalism have influenced Congressional activists regarding U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. Footnote 90 By rejecting nation-centered frameworks and scrutinizing the presumed geo-political boundedness of racial orders, political scientists might come to a more nuanced appreciation of diverse, transnational currents of black politics and thought.
But more than simply enhancing historical-interpretive accuracy, transnational perspectives both denaturalize culturally familiar objects of study in U.S. politics and serve as a “source of alternative visions and practices,” reconfiguring the possibilities of racial politics in the present. Footnote 91 It has become an almost uncontested assumption that contemporary racial struggles operate within the political lineage of the civil rights movement, where the focus was on extending the universal principles of the U.S. Revolution to African Americans. The influential political scientist Ralph Bunche famously expressed this position when he wrote of modern liberalism that “it is within this conceptual milieu, inherited from the [U.S.] Revolution, that the Negro has carried on his struggle for social, political and economic emancipation.” Footnote 92 But as Nikhil Pal Singh has argued, this framing “fails to recognize the historical depth and heterogeneity of black struggles against racism, narrowing the political scope of black agency and reinforcing a formal, legalistic view of black equality.” Footnote 93 By placing their understanding of racial orders partly outside U.S. national traditions, political theorists might recover alternative forms of political agency that exceed the demand for formalized legal equality exemplified by the liberal orientation of the civil rights movement.
For Walker, Holly, and Douglass, racial emancipation was more than a claim for formal equality based on descriptive representations of black humanity. It was a performative claim that constituted precisely that which it sought to describe—that is, black equality obtained not as the passive possession of civil rights, but as a form of political action. Haitian revolutionaries and radical abolitionists asserted racial equality and human dignity not through the extension of settled constitutional principles to blacks, but through an assault on ideologies of black inferiority and the radical self-assertion of black democratic capacities. From this perspective, the significance of contemporary racial struggles such as Black Lives Matter resides in the radical and transformative assertion of black democratic agency in opposition to cultural discourses of racial inequality, black criminality, and black deviancy.
