14. Conclusion: Reconsidering Ritchie and the Southern Press on the Haitian Revolution

Unlike shrill abolitionists and proslavery speakers whose motives obviously were at loggerheads in depicting Haiti as a warning to Southern slaveholders to free their slaves, the Richmond Enquirer was moderate and objective in its reporting on the progress of Haiti toward stability under the leadership of President Boyer, and had no qualms about Haitian independence. Ritchie preferred to depict Haiti as a “rehabilitated state” that proved the injustice of racial oppression by whites over Blacks. His support of Haiti as the destination for emancipated Virginia slaves revealed his antislavery inclinations, and that he did not fear a neighboring Black state as a danger to US national security. The foregoing study suggests that Southern newspapers on the whole did not dread the Haitian Revolution. Ritchie’s Richmond Enquirer and its contemporary Southern newspapers, two of which, the Alexandria Herald and the Charleston Courier are examined here, reported on Haiti in the same manner that they would about any other country. They attempted a degree of objectivity even when discussing atrocities like Dessalines’ massacre of French Whites in 1804 and the summary execution of US First Mate Robert Tate the same year. In essence, they understood that, despite its later reputation, the Haitian Revolution was not implemented to overthrow slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere. What is most noteworthy and surprising about contemporary Southern reaction to the Haitian Revolution is the general neglect to emphasize its unprecedented and epochal character. Both European intellectuals contemporaneous with the events and later scholars paid virtually exclusive attention to the French Revolution, which touched them directly because it occurred on the European Continent and continued to exert pervasive influence for two centuries.