Louverture privately severed colonial ties by favoring US and British trade over French

Evidence

Louverture drafted a public document allowing U.S. merchant ships to come to Saint-Domingue. Stevens asked him to go further, agreeing not to let any French vessels that had been armed outside the colony to enter its ports. Publicly accepting such a provision would have been a provocation to the French government, for it was essentially a declaration of independence: even as armed U.S. and British ships would be entering the ports, French ships arriving from elsewhere would be turned back. But, as Stevens assured Secretary of State Pickering in May 1799, Louverture “privately” agreed to this demand. During the next year, of the nearly 1,800 ships that came in and out of Saint-Domingue for trade, only 15 were French, while most of the rest were British and North American. The trade with the United States was particularly important to Louverture because, unlike the British, whose merchants were primarily supplying provisions, the merchants from the north were a source of guns and ammunition. During the next years merchants came regularly from the United States—one day in July 1801, 32 were counted in Le Cap’s port—playing a central role in sustaining Louverture’s military might. Early in 1802 General Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc complained that the United States had brought “guns, cannon, and powder” to the colony, convinced that it was the intention of the Americans to encourage the independence not only of Saint-Domingue but of all the Caribbean, so that they could control all the trade in the region. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 781

Categorization

• SEED: The detail that of 1,800 ships in a year only 15 were French while the rest were British and American is a striking quantification of how fast a colony could informally break with its metropole through commerce alone — an essay angle on trade embargoes as de facto declarations of independence.
• XREF: Connects to broader literature on how commerce reorganized Atlantic allegiances during the Age of Revolutions, and to later US policy contradictions toward Haiti.