Toussaint's Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution.

Toussaint's Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution. By Gordon S. Brown. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, c. 2005. Pp. xii, 321. $32.00, ISBN 1-57806-711-1.)

Toussaint's Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution, by Gordon S. Brown, a retired career Foreign Service officer, is part of a series intended "to increase public knowledge and appreciation of the involvement of American diplomats in world history ... telling the story of those who have conducted our foreign relations, as they lived, observed, and reported them" (p. vii). It focuses on the development of U.S. policy toward Haiti during the Washington, Adams, and Jefferson administrations as revealed through the eyes of American and French diplomats. Brown provides a brief and necessarily simplified narrative of the Haitian Revolution as background to a blow-by-blow account of official U.S. efforts to comprehend and respond to the slave revolution that transformed the Atlantic world.

The broad contours of Brown's story will be familiar to most specialists in southern history: he traces the federal government's initial relative openness to trade and consular relations with Toussaint Louverture's forces in St. Domingue and the process through which the United States moved to ignore and try to isolate St. Domingue and then independent Haiti during the first decade of the nineteenth century. Brown sees the inclusion of a clause effectively exempting St. Domingue from restrictions on trade with France during the Quasi-War--the so-called Toussaint's Clause--as the high-water mark in U.S.-Haitian relations. He argues that the settlement of the Quasi-War and the Jefferson administration's hope that France would help the United States acquire West Florida from Spain led to the abandonment of the emerging black republic when it declared its independence. Brown does not discount the influence of American racism or of the desire to protect slavery on U.S. policy, but he downplays them by foregrounding the specific and ever-changing contingencies to which French and American ambassadors and consular officials responded as they advised and influenced policy makers.

This book was not written primarily for a scholarly audience. It does not engage any historiography, it provides citations only for direct quotations, and the bibliography is spotty. This is not the book to turn to for cutting-edge interpretation. It would be a shame, however, if scholars ignored it. Toussaint's Clause provides something that few scholarly works of history can: a working foreign service officer's picture of the way that diplomats made policy toward Haiti. It provides extended quotations from diplomats' dispatches that will provide invaluable openings for further research even for historians disinclined to accept Brown's emphases. In short, while Toussaint's Clause is not the first place scholars interested in American foreign policy toward Haiti should turn, it is a useful supplement to Tim Matthewson's recent A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the Earl), Republic (Westport, Conn., 2003) and Rayford W. Logan's classic The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776-1891 (Chapel Hill, 1941).

JAMES SIDBURY

University of Texas