1804–1820: (Haiti and the Outer World: The Diplomatic Cordon Sanitaire): Except to jockey for commercial advantage between the contending regimes, the outer …

1804–1820: (Haiti and the Outer World: The Diplomatic Cordon Sanitaire): Except to jockey for commercial advantage between the contending regimes, the outer world gave little attention to Haiti’s internal struggle — according to their differing interests, only three powers, Britain, the United States, and France, took any notice of Haiti at all, and that in the most reserved and tentative fashion. (17) The Congress of Vienna had outlawed the African slave trade, but the consensus of the powers was far from recognizing a nation that owed its origin to slave insurrection; in Rayford Logan’s perceptive analogy, the specter of a free Black republic that owed its independence to a successful slave revolt frightened slaveholding countries as much as the shadow of Bolshevist Russia alarmed capitalist countries in 1917. (18) Though not in fact, Haiti still juridically remained a colony of France in revolt, and until the relationship between the two countries coincided with realities, no other nation was prepared to recognize Haiti as sovereign — in 1806, America’s John Randolph called Haiti “an anomaly among the nations of the earth,” and nine years later Albert Gallatin wrote that it must be considered as being neither independent nor part of the mother country. Britain’s two main objects concerning Haiti were to monopolize her trade and to prevent the export of her slave revolt to the mutinous maroons of Jamaica — the former calling for active commercial relations, the latter for a diplomatic cordon sanitaire — and yet in 1813 England’s trade with Christophe alone totaled some £1.2 million. The story of American relations with Haiti for a half century to come was that of merchants versus slave-owners: Northern merchants wanted to trade while Southern slave-owners abominated Haiti and all it stood for, and the planters prevailed, as Thomas Hart Benton told the Senate in 1826: “We receive no mulatto consuls or black ambassadors from [Haiti] — the peace of eleven states will not permit the fruits of a successful Negro insurrection to be exhibited among them.”