Overview

This book studies the approach Thomas Ritchie’s Richmond Enquirer took on the Haitian Revolution. It focuses on the paper's coverage of two major events that most historians have overlooked: Haitian ruler Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ massacres of French colonists in 1804 and President Jean-Pierre Boyer’s invasion and annexation of Santo Domingo (the present-day Dominican Republic) in 1822 and its aftermath. Using archival evidence, the book shows that the Enquirer was objective and even relatively friendly to the Haitian Revolution. Even in reporting such seemingly egregious acts as the massacre of the white population in 1804 and the invasion and annexation of a militarily weak neighbour eighteen years later, it avoided the use of implicitly or explicitly racist pejoratives toward the Haitian revolutionaries. The book contributes new perspectives on the Haitian Revolution’s final stages, particularly on these two important events in its evolution, as well as the Southern US press’s observations and reactions toward them. After briefly analysing other scholars’ treatments of US newspaper reports on the Haitian Revolution, which invariably ignored the Richmond Enquirer, the essay discerns that Northern newspapers paradoxically expressed greater fear of the Haitian Revolution’s impact on slave revolts and social stability than the Southern press did.

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9783032045720

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Arthur Scherr taught history at the City University of New York for many years. Three of his five books focus on opinion in the US of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath, and its link with the struggle to abolish slavery in the US, as seen by its leading political figures and in the partisan press: Thomas Jefferson’s Haitian Policy: Myths and Realities (2011); John Adams, Slavery, and Race: Ideas, Politics, and Diplomacy in an Age of Crisis (2018); and “Rightful Liberty”: Slavery, Morality, and Thomas Jefferson’s World (2021).

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