Today, the USS Constitution is one of the biggest tourist draws in Boston, attracting some half a million visitors a year. But at the turn of the 19th Century, when the Constitution was still a new ship, it traveled to what is now Haiti during the so-called Quasi-War with France. Its mission was twofold: protect American ships from French privateers, and foster ties between the U.S. and the emerging leadership.
The Haitian Revolution was a seismic event — the only time in history that a mass uprising of enslaved people threw off a colonial power and created an independent country. At its outset in the early 1790s, when George Washington was U.S. president, the Haitian Revolution got a mixed reception in the United States, where many leaders — including Washington himself — were also enslavers. At his direction, the U.S. sent Haiti’s French rulers $700,000 to put down the revolt — a massive amount of money at the time.
But then Massachusetts native John Adams became the U.S.’s second president.
“The change between the Adams Administration [and] the Washington Administration in terms of the Haitian Revolution could not have been starker,” said Ronald Angelo Johnson, a historian at Baylor University and the author of “Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution.”
Within months, Johnson said, Adams made a turn toward diplomacy with the revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture — a remarkable stance by the standards of that era.
“He and his secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, also from Massachusetts, are going to lay out a foreign policy that is going to treat the government of Toussaint Louverture as if Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved Black man, was a head of state,” Johnson said. “They are going to treat him almost as an equal administration.”
For example, in 1799, Adams dispatched Edward Stevens — a University of Edinburgh-trained physician and close friend of Alexander Hamilton — to Saint-Domingue as the U.S. consul general there, a title usually reserved for representatives to countries rather than colonies. It was a symbol of Adams’ regard for Louverture, and for Haiti’s revolutionary project more broadly. In doing so, Adams subverted prevailing assumptions about race and authority.
The previous year, as Louverture had sought the resumption of trade and a closer relationship with the United States, he, too, had subverted existing prejudices by sending Joseph Bunel, a member of Saint-Domingue’s white population, to the U.S. as his envoy.
“Newspapers across the country are reporting this,” Johnson said. “This is big news, that a Black man is sending an envoy to the United States — directly to the president of the United States.”
Bunel held a secret meeting in Philadelphia with Pickering and two members of Congress, then met with twice with Adams himself. This diplomatic outreach paved the way for Congress to reopen trade with Saint-Domingue, despite opponents’ deep-set and deeply racialized fears.
“This is 1799,” Johnson said. “For eight years, Americans have been reading about [the Haitian rebels]. They’ve been killing Frenchman, Spanish, British ... Americans are so afraid that if the Haitian Revolution succeeds, they’re going to bring the revolution to the shores of the United States.”
USS Constitution sets sail
Here’s where the USS Constitution enters the story. In 1799, the Adams Administration dispatched a squadron of ships to Saint-Domingue. The Constitution, which was the lead vessel, was captained by Silas Talbot, a Massachusetts native. The squadron was charged with protecting U.S. shipping from French privateers in the Quasi-War — and also with fostering ties with Louverture’s nascent government.
Despite those general instructions, the parameters of the squadron’s relationship with Toussaint and his forces would have been ambiguous and evolved in real time, said Carl Herzog, the Constitution’s public historian.
“American captains were happy to help Toussaint in any way they could, but the Navy was very specific about not taking bribes from Toussaint, who was happy to provide gifts to American captains that assisted him,” Herzog said.
Captains of that era would have received “broad brush orders,” Herzog said. “But then ... what do you do on a day-to-day basis when you’re not under a central command who can micromanage the situation?”
Johnson, the Baylor historian, said that even though Talbot was charged with cultivating good relations with Louverture, he pursued that project assiduously.
“He puts himself and every ship, every commander, at the disposal of Touissant Louveture,” Johnson said. “Silas Talbot makes an incredible statement for 1799: ‘I am willing to serve under Toussaint Louverture.’ Well, how many white Americans at that level would say, ‘I’m going to serve under a Black man who has been enslaved before?’”
The entire squadron followed Talbot’s lead. When Louverture attacked the port city of Jacmel, the USS General Greene gave him crucial gun cover, then welcomed him on board after the battle with a full federal salute.
Later, when Louverture’s adopted nephew, General Moyse, boarded the Constitution to strategize, he received a full federal salute as well. And then, in what Johnson calls a remarkable coda, Moyse invited Talbot and the Constitution’s officers to dine at his home.
“So now you have Captain Talbot and six officers, including one Marine officer, going to the home of a Black general,” Johnson said.
That elaborate dinner, he said, brought together white American officers and 30 Black officers from the Haitian military who would have outranked nearly all of the Americans.
“It made such an impression on Talbot that he writes about it — that’s how I know about it,” Johnson added. “He wrote about what they ate, he wrote about the wine that served. He was just elated. And you can tell in the writing he had never experienced anything like this in his life.“
At that same meeting, Talbot and Moise hatched a plan to provide extra munitions to Louverture in contravention of American law — a plan they successfully executed. Johnson argues that, for the USS Constitution-led squadron, cultivating ties with Louverture’s government was as important as protecting America’s trade interests in Saint-Domingue, and the decision to aide Louverture with munitions helps make that case.
This burgeoning closeness with Haiti’s revolutionaries didn’t last, however. In 1800, Adams lost the presidential election to Thomas Jefferson, who promptly recalled the Saint-Domingue naval station back to the U.S.
Edward Stevens was also recalled, and Jefferson downgraded the title of the U.S.’s emissary to Saint-Domingue from consul general to the much lower rank of commercial agent.
Louverture wrote to new U.S. Secretary of State James Madison that everything the Haitian rebels had built with the Adams Administration was being rapidly destroyed. He was right: when Napoleon attempted to retake Haiti for France, Jefferson’s administration mandated that the U.S. not intervene.
The U.S wouldn’t recognize Haiti as an independent nation until 1862. But Johnson said those few years at the end of the 19th century suggest an alternate path that U.S.-Haitian relations could have taken.
”It just defies all the stereotypes and mores you think about in racial relations in the 1790s,“ he said.
