Jefferson's 'Cannibals' Revisited: A Closer Look at His Notorious Phrase

Abstract

THOMAS JEFFERSON'S REPUTED HATRED OF THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION AND his obsession with destroying the first African American manifestation of bourgeois-democratic ideology, as Eugene D. Genovese has called it, are among the most salient examples given of his ideological self-contradictions. (1) The great Virginian, who famously wrote that men are created equal, even though he possessed hundreds of slaves, and who claimed that [w]e are all Republicans, we are all Federalists while instituting a spoils system that swept his political opponents from office, certainly failed in many cases to practice what he preached. (2) Yet such contradictions between thought and action apparently had little place in Jefferson's view of Haiti, known as Saint-Domingue (the French name when it was France's colony) or St. Domingo (what Anglo-Americans often called it) before its independence in 1804. From the outset, Jefferson hoped that the slave uprising there would be crushed, eliminating a potential precedent for southern bondpersons. As Douglas R. Egerton writes in the chapter on Jefferson's racial views in the recently published Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson, If Jefferson was resolute on any point, it was regarding his fear that slave rebelliousness in the Caribbean might spread to the southern mainland. (3) This obsession caused him to instigate congressional embargoes against Haiti, first on U.S. arms sales in 1805 and a year later on all trade with Haiti, both contraband and noncontraband, a ban lasting from 1806 to 1809. In July 1801, at the outset of his presidency, he went so far as to blunderingly assure France's charge d'affaires in the United States, Louis-Andre Pichon, that he would join First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte in starv[ing] (that is, Toussaint Louverture, the great black leader of the revolution in Saint Domingue and its governor-general at the time), facilitating France's reconquest of the rebellious colony. But Jefferson reversed himself when he ascertained that France intended to reoccupy Louisiana, a territory (especially its port of New Orleans) vital to the trade and expansion of the United States. Almost too late, Jefferson concluded that only Bonaparte's defeat in Saint Domingue, the fulcrum of his projected revived New World empire, would lead him to abandon his scheme and sell the region to the United States. Consequently, Jefferson allowed U.S. merchants and arms traders to ship their goods to Saint Domingue's rebels. He obviously cared more about the future of the United States than the fate of Saint Dominguans. (4) In studies of what Jefferson said about the Haitian Revolution, the quotation historians use most to demonstrate his assumed racist distaste for Toussaint Louverture and the Haitians is his alleged infamous description of them as Cannibals of the terrible republic. In part because of the notorious vulgarity of this phrase, which Jefferson penned in February 1799 when he was John Adams's vice president, this article seeks to determine more clearly the context and connotations of the statement and to ascertain Jefferson's intent in employing it and what it reveals about Jefferson's views on Haiti, slavery, and race. In relation to the late-eighteenth-century climate of opinion, when worldwide hysteria over the French Revolution and its effects was at fever pitch, did the term cannibals have an etymology or contemporary significance that influenced Jefferson? Was he employing it as a code word? Was Jefferson being literal and racist in his use of the term cannibals? Did he in fact consider the Saint Dominguans man-eaters? What exactly did Jefferson mean by the phrase Cannibals of the terrible republic? Did he vapidly regard Saint Domingue as an independent republic, even though it was never a republic and Toussaint Louverture and most other Saint Dominguan leaders in 1799 still viewed it as a French colony? Close interrogation of Jefferson's statement uncovers unexpected transatlantic affiliations, validating historians' recent emphasis on the Atlantic world and their contention that the politics, society, and culture of the early United States are best understood as intersecting reciprocally with the Atlantic cultures of Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. …