The Southern Response: The Triumph of Slavery
The South had no trouble recognizing the Haitian Revolution’s potential implications. While slave-owners had always understood that slavery was a troublesome business, the uprising in Haiti forced them to realize that slavery was seriously dangerous. American newspapers bolstered these fears as reports of violence and massacres streamed in. Reports such as this one from the Virginia Argus were but one of the many reports that emphasized black violence and stocked fears among American whites.
These fears were then further reinforced when reports of slave revolt conspiracies began to emerge across the south. Conspiracies were reported in Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. In Charleston, four African Americans were tried and two were sentenced to death for attempting to burn down the city, in what be one of the many slave revolt scares that would emerge in the state. Whether or not all of these revolts were connected to the Haitian Revolution is unclear, but the slave-owning population certainly believed that the revolts were caused by revolutionary ideas that originated in Haiti. As a result, the South strengthened its slave institutions. The international slave trade was banned in 1792 in South Carolina in order to prevent the American slave population from growing any larger. In Virginia, the assembly made “exciting slaves to insurrection or murder” punishable by death and forbid slaves from gathering at night or on Sunday after work. Slave-owners grew more concerned about the spreading of revolutionary ideas, to point that a man was imprisoned for publishing a pamphlet that contained Haiti’s declaration of independence.
As these fears began to emerge, so too did new ideas about slavery and why slavery must be maintained. John Taylor, a Virginia politician, played a significant role in compiling many of these ideas, and his arguments against emancipation would linger up until the civil war. Taylor argued that Haiti proved that slaves were not ready for liberty and that emancipation would only result in destruction and tyranny. He argued that slavery was a “necessary evil,” and that abolition would ultimately lead to a war between the two races.