US leaders feared the Saint-Domingue rebellion would spread to enslaved Southerners

Evidence

By the late 1790s, it had become clear that the rebellion in Saint-Domingue could not be contained. White politicians in the United States grew increasingly alarmed. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, one prominent Virginian, Arthur Campbell, expressed his concern that the Saint-Domingue rebellion would lead to similar “calamities” in Virginia. If that happened, he warned, the United States would “rapidly decline.” Henry Tazewell, a U.S. senator from Virginia, apparently agreed, anxiously urging Jefferson to recognize that people from Saint-Domingue gave the Southern states “much to dread.” Fear permeated the highest levels of government, and in 1799, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering urgently wrote to President John Adams, arguing that in the interest of national security, the United States must use all necessary measures to prevent Black revolt: “Our southern states…are yet in much danger from attempts to excite the blacks to insurrection.” It is essential, he urged, “to guard against the danger to be apprehended from St. Domingo.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 369

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing work on how origin stories and specters of revolt shaped antebellum policy; also resonates with the Haitian Revolution’s global reach as covered in other chapters of this project. — connects to: Fear of loyalist-slavery-invasion convergence pushed southern delegates toward independence — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 133