In comparing two other Southern newspapers, the Democratic-Republican Alexandria Herald and the Federalist Charleston Courier, with the Richmond Enquirer in their views on Haiti, it appears that they were more conscious than Ritchie of the constitutional differences between the southern Republic of Pétion and Boyer and the northern empire and monarchy of Dessalines and Christophe, respectively. These newspapers sometimes criticized the royal absolutism and militarism of Dessalines and Christophe, and adopted a more favorable tone toward the nominally republican government of southern Haiti. At the same time, they condemned instances of authoritarianism and militarism perpetrated by Boyer. On the whole, like the Enquirer, they supported the Haitian Revolution. Further indicating American republicans’ alienation from a monarchical regime in the Western Hemisphere, the Herald depicted Boyer as the friend of domestic improvements and of helping the masses. Contrastingly, it considered Christophe a selfish absolute monarch who forced his people to work on improving his military fortifications. Indeed, the Herald’s praise of Haiti as the ideal venue for Black prosperity and self-discovery was perhaps unduly effusive. Contrariwise, the Charleston Courier’s lengthy, irate reporting of Dessalines’ troops’ brutal hanging of an American seamen, Robert Tate of the Pilgrim, in October 1804, for hiding twenty white French stowaways seeking to escape the island and certain death, revealed an undercurrent of hostility toward the Black dictatorship, perhaps rooted in the large-scale immigration of free and enslaved Blacks to Charleston in 1793. On the other hand, Southern Federalists perhaps intended to stir up public reaction against the Jefferson Administration for its failure to retaliate against the Black, anti-American regime. Contrary to what historians take for granted about Southern newspapers, the Courier, as well as Ritchie’s Enquirer and the Alexandria Herald, did not discuss the upheaval, or its occasional atrocities, in terms different from those it would employ in reporting on military brutality or violence in any other independent nation, including white, “civilized” Western European countries like Great Britain and France. In the federal case of Elkison vs. Deliesseline (1823), however, the Charleston Courier objected that Justice William Johnson’s decision in favor of a free Black seaman indirectly threatened to permit unlimited immigration from Haiti. Unlike the Richmond Enquirer and the Alexandria Herald, the Charleston Courier deliberately brought up the issue of US recognition of Haiti in terms of the conflict over slavery between free and slave states. However, despite its location in the fervently proslavery Lower South, the Charleston Courier, like the Richmond Enquirer and the Alexandria Herald, advocated encouraging free Blacks to immigrate to Haiti for greater opportunity despite the ostensible threat to slaveholding states posed by a stronger, more populous Haiti. It was more fearful of Northern domination of the US Government, which might eventuate in the abolition of slavery in the Southern states, than of the independent country of Haiti itself.
