A successful Haitian revolution would inspire enslaved peoples across the hemisphere

Evidence

It was a civil war that no slaveholder, including Thomas Jefferson, wanted enslaved Africans to win. If these Black freedom fighters could declare their independence and win it on the richest soil of the Americas, then their nation would become the hemispheric symbol of freedom, not Jefferson’s United States. Enslaved peoples everywhere would be inspired by that symbol and fight for their freedom, and there was nothing that racist ideas could do anymore to stop them. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 314

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that a free Black nation would outshine the US as freedom’s hemispheric symbol connects to Jefferson’s White-supremacist self-interest being threatened not by ideas but by material geopolitical rivals.