Throughout the eighteenth century, the French island of Saint Domingue (the early name of Haiti) and the British North American colonies were tied together by trade. Although illegal until the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), and limited to only a few ports after that, exchanges between North American merchants and the planters of the thriving French colony were constant and lucrative: the by-products of sugar, particularly molasses, were traded for provisions desperately needed in the colony. There were other connections as well. During the American Revolution, a unit of soldiers of African descent recruited in Saint Domingue participated in the French mission to assist the rebels at Savannah. The victory against Britain in North America inspired some planters in Saint Domingue who dreamed of increased autonomy and who used the political opening of the French Revolution to clamor for it.
Between 1789 and 1791, planters and free people of color seeking an end to racist legislation and access to political rights pushed for reform from Paris and increasingly battled one another in the colony. Then, in August of 1791 a massive slave insurrection began in the northern plain of the colony. It became the largest and most successful slave revolt in history, leading to the abolition of slavery in the colony in 1793, a decision ratified and extended to the entire French empire in 1794. The uprising sent waves of fear through the communities of slave owners of the United States, as well as inspiring some among the enslaved. North Americans could read regularly in newspapers of events in the Caribbean colony, and many came face to face with the impact of slave revolution as waves of refugees—the largest of them in late 1791 and in mid-1793—came into North American port towns such as Philadelphia and Charleston. Among these refugees were not only white planters and slaves but also free people of color. Many members of this latter group settled in Louisiana in the early nineteenth century, after being expelled from Cuba. They had a major impact on the demography and political culture of the region for generations.
Saint Domingue's slave revolution posed delicate problems for the leadership of the United States. After 1794 France pursued a policy of revolutionary emancipationism, using abolition as a weapon of war against the British, recruiting armies of former slaves, and encouraging uprisings in enemy colonies. France also outfitted and rewarded privateers in the Caribbean. Their crews were often populated with former slaves, and they regularly captured North American ships. French privateering led to a break in U.S.-French relations in the late 1790s. At the same time, however, the chaotic situation in the French Caribbean provided an attractive opening for North American traders, who built on and expanded their long-standing links with the colony during the revolutionary years, profiting handsomely.
By the late 1790s Saint Domingue was under the control of General Toussaint-Louverture (c.1743-1803). Wary of the conservative direction of metropolitan French politics, which he rightly believed represented a threat to the policy of emancipation, Lou-verture adroitly cultivated alliances with both the British and North American governments. For the United States under the administration of John Adams, the link with Louverture represented an ongoing economic opportunity and a way to strike at the French. The consul Edward Stevens was sent to work with Louverture, and in 1799 the U.S. Navy supported him in his war against André Rigaud, who controlled the southern portion of the colony. Concerns about the possible "contagion" of the revolution in Saint Domingue to slaves in North America were superseded by the political and economic advantages of working with Louverture.
North American policies toward the revolution in Saint Domingue shifted dramatically with the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Although trading continued—the French blamed the United States for supplying Louverture with his guns and ammunition—there was growing hostility to the regime in Saint Domingue, and the easing of relations with the French reduced the political value of an alliance with Louverture's regime. Jefferson approved of the French attempt, in 1802, to wrest control of the colony from Louverture and his followers. He was right that the French mission would be to the advantage of the United States, though not for the reasons he expected. The decimation and ultimate defeat of the French mission at the hands of the former slave Jean-Jacques Dessalines in late 1802 and 1803 was the cause of Napoleon Bonaparte's decision to sell Louisiana to the United States. The reconstruction of Saint Domingue had been the centerpiece of Bonaparte's plans for the Americas, and once he lost the island colony, Louisiana became irrelevant to him.
Even as the purchase of Louisiana allowed for the expansion of slavery in the United States, the example of the Haitian Revolution resonated through the uprisings of Gabriel and, later, Denmark Vesey. But Haiti's independence, declared 1 January 1804, went unacknowledged by the United States until the intervention of Senator Charles Sumner in 1862.