Haiti’s 1804 revolution terrified slaveholders across the Americas

Evidence

The Haitian revolution confirmed those fears. In 1804, some nineteen years after Jefferson’s expression of fear and trembling, Toussaint Louverture and Dessaline defeated Napoleon’s armies, and Haiti became the first black nation in the new world. Napoleon’s defeat sent shock waves throughout the slaveholding Americas. People feared that those forced to toil in the fields would inevitably turn their rage against their masters and that, given the moral abomination of slavery, God would take the side of the slaves. Slave rebellion would be divinely sanctioned. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 238

Categorization

• XREF: Haiti as a generator of pan-American white terror connects to broader colonial/settler fear dynamics, useful background for the reader’s analysis of how fear underwrites the value gap.