29 August 1791 · Caribbean
The planters go to Philadelphia for help, and hit a wall of American self-interest
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One week after the north burned, a delegation of Saint-Domingue planters arrived in the United States asking for military and financial help to put the rising down. Julius Scott's account of what happened next is the useful part. The American response was tangled, because the same republic that had just finished its own revolution had a slaveholding South that badly wanted this fire extinguished, and a merchant class that badly wanted the Saint-Domingue trade to keep running. Aid was sent. It was also hedged. What Scott tracks in The Common Wind is the other network moving in the same water: sailors, dockworkers, runaways and free black mariners carrying news of the rising into every port in the Caribbean and up the American coast faster than any government could suppress it. The planters sailed north to ask for soldiers. The news had already sailed north without them.
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