It is often said that United States policy towards Haiti frequently springs from inattention. Ashli White's Encountering Revolution demonstrates convincingly that this has not always been the case. As the subtitle of her exhaustively researched work states, slave insurrections in St. Domingue had a profound impact on the early years of a United States fresh from its own war of liberation. Indeed, the larger argument that underpins this study is that it is impossible to grasp the nature of early American nationalism without placing it in a hemispheric or, even more importantly, an Atlantic context. Transnationalism in general is very much in scholarly vogue today and particularly so when it comes to inter-American connections. This has led scholars to look for transnational hemispheric models almost exclusively in modern times, leaving out of account the extent to which the nineteenth century in general and Haiti in particular provide important instances of hemispheric cross-cultural contact.

Scholarly interest in the Haitian Revolution has almost exclusively focussed on making the case for giving the Haitian Revolution its rightful place in the Age of Revolutions. Much of this material is covered in White's excellent “Essay on Sources” which is an invaluable bibliographic essay in itself. There has been relatively little published, however, on the revolution's impact on the hemisphere. Since slavery was first abolished in St. Domingue in 1794 and since Haiti was the second nation to achieve independence in the Americas, its pre- and postcolonial past must be a subject of great interest to those drawn to the first manifestations of inter-American contact. In this regard, Encountering Revolution is particularly welcome because, as White boldly asserts in her introduction, “Saint Domingue was central to initial U. S. attempts to stake out a place as a sovereign nation in the thriving Atlantic system” (7). Encountering Revolution follows in a far more searching manner Alfred Hunt's Haiti's Influence on the Antebellum South (1988). However, not only does she trace the impact of Haitian immigrants to a much earlier time and place, the 1790s and Philadelphia respectively, but also she replaces the idea of influence with a more complex web of human interactions as Americans and Haitians encounter each other at a chaotic turn of the century.

By insisting on seeing the US as “enmeshed in the vast Atlantic world” (5), White sets out to “disrupt the narratives of self-satisfying exceptionalism” (211) that ignore the fact that American residents were bound to see the viability of their own slave-owning republic through the lens of the refugees fleeing St. Domingue. Central to this web model is its interactive nature. White emphasizes the shared traits that linked two of the richest slave-owning colonies in the New World by demonstrating the links between urban creole communities of the Atlantic port cities of Philadelphia, Cap Français, New Orleans, Jeremie, Charleston and Port-au-Prince. As she points out, in the eighteenth century “Saint-Domingue and the United States were both referred to as ‘America’” (13). While we are reminded of the impact that the US had on events in St. Domingue, Encountering Revolution is a book of American history and its main focus is consequently about the way the early republic saw its own future in terms of what was happening in St. Domingue.

White's dispassionate and thorough scholarship carefully fleshes out the human dimension of the “Encountering” in her title. In their desire to see themselves as different and their system of enslavement as more benign, US residents resisted philanthropic impulses and saw the fleeing French planters as so transformed by the tropical climate as to have become cruel and corrupt. Their excesses had therefore provoked black revolt and they, like the French aristocrats before them, had got their just deserts. White refugees presented themselves as Republican victims of the misguided radicalism of the French state and hence deserving of the philanthropy of the Americans. This controversy even provoked debates in France as to whether these refugees were legitimate or aristocratic émigrés who threatened French interests. What happened in Philadelphia in the 1790s would recur in 1809 when thousands of refugees and their slaves entered New Orleans after temporary asylum in Cuba. Again, their arrival sparked controversy, especially since a year-old abolition of the slave trade made the landing of refugee slaves illegal. There were both efforts to organize charity campaigns and a fear of contamination by “French negroes” who could bring insurrection to the South. Nevertheless, Haiti's Revolution became for black Americans the “lodestar” (146) for their campaign for emancipation and citizenship in the United States. The misplaced confidence that Americans had in their own society is one of the most forceful arguments of Encountering Revolution and again illustrates the extent to which national mythmaking was dependent on events on St. Domingue.