The United States and Haiti,
“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”
From an American point of view, the most vital intersection of Haitian and American history is at the point of the Louisiana Purchase. Napoleon Bonaparte’s decision to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States doubled the size of the young country and secured the much sought-after port of New Orleans, expanding trade for states bordering the Mississippi. The Saint-Domingue rebels’ defeat of Napoleon’s armies under Leclerc halted what was ultimately to have been France’s North American campaign. So thorough were the Rebels of the newly founded free Black Nation of Haiti, that it destroyed the age of colonialism, ended Slavery, and establish a new world precedence. The purchase reshaped the US territory as well as its culture, without it, the US would look completely different.
A Quote, “The role which the great Negro Toussaint, called L’Ouverture, played in the history of the United States has seldom been fully appreciated. Representing the age of revolution in America, he rose to leadership through a bloody terror, which contrived a Negro “problem” for the Western hemisphere, intensified and defined the anti-slavery movement, became one of the causes, and probably the prime one, which led Napoleon to sell Louisiana for a song; and, finally, through the interworking of all these effects, rendered more certain the final prohibition of the slave-trade by the United States in 1807″ (Du Bois, p. 70).
