The Louisiana Purchase, or, the Unrecognized Benefit the Haitian Revolution had on the United States

The Haitian Revolution

We all know about the Louisiana Purchase – one of those many parts of American history that are obviously important but just not that interesting.  What high school students tend to hear is that France had a bunch of land it wasn’t really using, and needed some quick cash to fight some wars and so sold that land to the US.  Thus President Jefferson was credited with doubling the size of the United States, and then Lewis and Clark went on their famous expedition to find wooly mammoths.   

The real story is pretty interesting.  Jefferson was elected in 1801, at which point Spain owned Louisiana.  Spain was troubled by America’s growing western population because it had lucrative silver mines in Mexico, and used the vast land of Louisiana as a buffer to keeper western settlers out.  However, Spain’s hold on the West was weak, and it worried that it was not strong enough to keep western migration at bay.  Within months of Jefferson's election, Spain sold Louisiana to France, knowing that France was strong enough to keep American settlers out of Louisiana.

Napoleon was interested in Louisiana primarily because it could provide resources for its sugar colony, San Dominique… soon to be known as Haiti.  France grew 70% of its sugar in Haiti, using slave-labor practices that made slavery in America pale in comparison.  This sugar was sold around Europe to great profit.  In 1801, Napoleon sent a force of forty thousand troops to crush the revolution led by ToussaintL’Ouverture - a man I would want all my students to learn about - but Napoleon's army was incapacitated by tropical disease, with 4,000 of his men dying to this cause alone.  Napoleon abandoned the island and sold Louisiana, now useless to him, to Jefferson.

ToussaintL’Ouverture, leader of the Haitian revolution

The ironic side of this story is that the liberation of Haiti, which terrified many Americans, played a large role in strengthening the United States beyond what it could have possibly hoped for.  In fact, when France first purchased Louisiana from Spain, Jefferson immediately dispatched diplomats to France to avoid war: after all, Napoleon was in the middle of empire building on a massive scale and was interested in the Americas.  Americans could tolerate a weak Spain on its doorstep.  But a powerful France, which at that very moment seemed capable of conquering the continent of Europe...?   

Thus the liberation of Haiti played a role in helping the United States double its size and avoid war with a great European power.  Human beings, however, have a remarkable capacity to notice their difficulties to the point of being blind to their blessings.  All that was noticed at the time was that the liberation of Haiti had showed the possibility of successful slave rebellions.  And indeed, the news spread like wildfire throughout slave communities in the United States; plans for slave rebellions were hatched and a few just barely thwarted.  The South entered a period of increased fear of their slaves, and as is so common in history, increased fear was accompanied by increased repression.  Talk of gradual emancipation quickly eroded.  The North and the South drifted farther apart, as they would continue to do for decades....  

For the story of the Haitian Revolution, see Avengers of the New World.