February 16 - February 20, 2017

February 16: American Colonization Society Token, 1833

Social media and the news has been full of conversation about immigration today. For nearly all modern Americans, our ancestors came from somewhere else. The United States is seen, both in historical terms and modern discourse, as a place people come.

For African-Americans over the course of the last three quarters of the 19th century, the United States was a place people left too.

While the most openminded of the men who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence believed in the theoretical rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for people of all backgrounds, they could not overcome the ideals of white supremacy enough to imagine a multicultural society based on equality. Having seen slavery up close and understood its horrors, the idea that whites and blacks could ever live in communal harmony was literally unthinkable.

Despite this, many realized that slavery was unjust, and that it could either end peaceably or violently. Most were certain that a resolution that ended with large numbers of free African-Americans was guaranteed to be a violent one. Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the United States in the early 1830s, summed it up this way: “I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the United States. The negroes may long remain slaves without complaining, but if they are once raised to the level of free men, they will soon revolt at being deprived of all their civil rights, and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily declare themselves as enemies." Tocqueville was being genteel. Henry Clay offered a similar sentiment more directly: “of all classes of our population, the most vicious is that of the free colored people.”

Convinced of the impossibility of blacks and whites living side by side, expatriation was the solution that assuaged their guilt over slavery without having to suffer through the reality of building an integrated but diverse society. The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816 to pursue this goal, formed by an unusual coalition of missionaries, proto-abolitionists, and defenders of slavery who were joined in their conviction that, once freed, it was best if African-Americans left the country of their birth.

The organization’s full name was The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color in America. Among those present at the society’s organizational meeting were Henry Clay, Francis Scott Key, Andrew Jackson, and President James Monroe, all of whom were slaveowners. Former President Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in 1814 “I have seen no proposition so expedient on the whole, as that as emancipation of those born after a given day, and of their education and expatriation after a given age,” was an early supporter. In 1822, after acquiring land along the coast from the presiding local leaders, the American Colonization Society founded a region they called Liberia. It would remain the property of the Society until it declared its independence in 1847.

Most of those who left the United States for Liberia before the Civil War did not go of their own accord. Society members often emancipated those they had enslaved but made their expatriation to Liberia a condition of their freedom. Maryland enshrined expatriation in law in 1832 with a series of byzantine strictures that forced most free African-Americans to leave the state, while offering to fund their transport to Liberia.

Not all who emigrated to Liberia were forced. For some, the desperation of limited opportunity and the promise of future violence meant leaving the land of their birth for a country they’d never seen was the best available opportunity. Others were induced to migrate out of missionary ardor, and some educated free-born blacks saw the new nation as a promising economic proposition. Most who arrived in the 1820s and 1830s found life in Liberia incredibly difficult, and starvation and illness took many before they even arrived.

Shockingly, the American Colonization Society survived far longer than slavery did. While the largest number of freed African-Americans were transported to Africa by the Society between 1848 and 1854 (about 4000 people), the Society continued to assist African-Americans who wanted to leave the United States through the late 19th century and did not dissolve until 1913. When the Election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction, fear over the political changes inspired a “Back to Africa” movement that included the founding of the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company in Charleston, South Carolina. In May 1880, 136 people took part in the "Arkansas Exodus," transplanting themselves from Arkansas to New York and then to Liberia.

The American Colonization Society had cent-sized tokens struck in 1833 (probably in Connecticut, perhaps in New Jersey) to assist the expatriates with their commercial needs in Liberia. The same year, James Madison rose to the presidency of the Society following the death of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. Carroll’s leadership in the Society was the crowning achievement of a life spent voicing his opposition to slavery. Carroll owned 334 slaves at the time of his death. He freed one. At the time of the 1860 census, 76 slaves remained on the family’s Maryland plantation.


February 17: Nat Love, Lucretia Marchbanks, and a Deadwood, Dakota Territory Silver Bar

For today’s piece, let’s look at a few people who flourished in one of the whitest states in the Union: South Dakota. According to the 2010 Census, just 1.3% of South Dakotans are African-American. In 1876, most sources indicate that African-Americans composed roughly 1 in 100 residents, so not much has changed in the last 140 years.

For the first decade or so after the Dakota Territory was organized in 1861, most of the non-natives who arrived were in the military. As they poked around, their reconnaissance was ostensibly fixed on the native tribes, but officers also kept a lookout for valuable resources: waterways, trails that could be improved into roads, mineral riches, and more. In 1874, George Armstrong Custer’s men found gold in the Black Hills, which were owned by the Sioux people by the terms of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Once gold was found, settlers followed; the Sioux were awarded monetary damages by the Supreme Court in 1980, but refused payment and instead insisted that the United States meet its treaty obligations and return their land.

At this point, most African-Americans lived in the Reconstruction South, a singularly inhospitable place to try to find security and raise a family. While the Great Migration into northern cities was still decades away, large numbers of African-Americans began to drift away from their southern moorings. Many of the most adventurous headed not north, but west. Some joined the black military units called the “Buffalo Soldiers,” but hundreds of thousands of others headed into or across the Great Plains within 20 years after the Civil War. The 1870 census counted more than a quarter million African-Americans among the western states and territories.

In 1876, the gold rush in the Black Hills of western South Dakota hit its fever pitch, following earlier gold rushes in California, Colorado, and elsewhere. Deadwood became one of the world's most famous boom towns, attracting adventurers and opportunists from all over: cowboys, profiteers, miners, and assorted unsavory others. The vast majority were men, but one woman quickly became a beloved town celebrity. Lucretia Marchbanks became known as “Aunt Lou” in Deadwood soon after her arrival in the summer of 1876. She had been born enslaved in Tennessee and traveled to California as a teenager during the first great American gold rush. Now on the far side of 40, with a lifetime of work and travel already behind her, she was hired as a cook at the Grand Central Hotel. Her food -- and toughness -- became legendary, and in 1879 she won a contest as the most popular woman in Deadwood, taking home a diamond ring as her prize. She was soon poached by the Golden Gate Hotel, one of the classier hotels in town, then lured away again to become the executive chef for the Father Desmet Mining Company headquarters in Central City, South Dakota. She remained with the Desmet Mine for several years, retiring in 1883 as the life cycle of the gold rush began to peter out. Then aged about 50, having been celebrated as among the most famous respectable women in Deadwood, she bought a ranch outside of town, where she farmed until her death in 1911.

As Lucretia Marchbanks was running a kitchen and winning hearts in the center of town, Nat Love was driving cattle into it. Like Marchbanks, Nat Love was also born enslaved in Tennessee, though his skills were very different from hers: Love was a cowboy. Love developed equestrian skills as a teenager, while his family sharecropped tobacco and corn. He left home at 16, heading first to Dodge City, Kansas, then the center of the Great Plains cattle trade.

According to his autobiography "Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as 'Deadwood Dick,'" he arrived in Deadwood on a cattle drive on July 3, 1876. He was charged with helping deliver “three thousand head of three-year-old steers” from the Texas Panhandle, arriving in the Dakotas just a week after Custer and the 7th Cavalry were massacred at Little Big Horn. The day after his arrival, Love and five other “colored cow boys” competed in a rodeo with a prize of $200. Love won the contest, later recounting “right there the assembled crowd named me Deadwood Dick [after a dime novel character of the time] and proclaimed me champion roper of the western cattle country.” He went on to win a shooting competition the same day “and left Deadwood in a blaze of glory.”

Despite the successes of Lucretia Marchbanks and Nat Love, most African-Americans in Deadwood were marginalized as much as they would have been in the segregated North or Jim Crow South. One group of miners, whose names have apparently lost to history, ended up becoming rich men as a result of their exclusion. Arriving in town from Montana in that same summer of 1876, the men were dismissively offered a mining claim on a hilltop outside of Deadwood, an improbable location for finding any gold given that most nuggets were found in washouts and gulches. They struck a rich vein, mined a fortune, and quickly left town, a stroke of luck that inspired the townspeople to name the hilltop for them. In most 20th century references, the hill is called “Negro Hill,” but older sources (including some posted on the United States Geological Survey website) identify it by its more offensive original moniker.

While the gold on that hilltop quickly disappeared, a deeper vein of tin attracted enough miners in the 1880s that a settlement named Tinton sprang up. Stephen Molitor, whose father founded one of the most famous assaying firms of the California gold rush, established the American Tin Company in Deadwood to capitalize upon the finds. A number of his claims were on the hill that the African-American miners had made famous, and this ingot identifies those claims as the source of its raw tin. The nature of the marking makes it an uncomfortable, even offensive, object, not only for the term it employs, but for the fact that an area so conscious of its history couldn’t even be bothered to record the original discoverers’ names.

The unidentified African-American miners who discovered the metallic jackpot at Tinton were given fortune while the fame they were due was withheld. Lucretia Marchbanks and Nat Love parlayed their bravery and sense of adventure into fame that outlived them, but all things considered they may have preferred to have been those miners, disappearing into the mists of time with saddlebags full of gold.


February 18: Jack Johnson Boxing Medal, 1910

Through 18 days of Black History Month, you may have noticed something missing: athletes and entertainers.

There is a reason for that.

Stories of African-American historical interest that bubble up to temporary prominence during Black History Month tend to be gathered into well defined categories: antebellum slavery, civil rights activists, military figures, men and women of letters, or athletes and entertainers.

So much of the popular “Black History Month” content leans heavily into that final category, so much so that it plays into the historical slander that African-Americans are most valuable when they’re performing for White America.

Just as an example, if you go to the about.com page entitled “100 Famous African-American Men and Woman,” which bills itself as a good place for “researching a topic for Black History Month,” of those 100 people, 48 of them play sports or entertain. That’s too many. It reflects a particular strain of ancient bigotry, but beyond that it shows academic laziness. Stories of African-American achievement have always existed, despite the old saw about being “twice as good,” but those who write history’s first draft (journalists) and second (historians) have often overlooked them. Overcoming that structural issue within the world of history is the crux of what Black History Month is about. To tell the stories of the rich and famous alone does a disservice to all of us -- black, white, or other -- who are not.

Despite the fact that seeing Halle Berry highlighted during Black History Month makes me cringe (yes, it took until 2001 for an African-American woman to win a Best Actress Oscar), there are plenty of athletes and performers whose lives of achievement transcend their sport or art. Marian Anderson. Jackie Robinson. Muhammad Ali. Billie Holliday. Scott Joplin. Jesse Owens. History has something important to say about each one of them. I wish this month was longer.

Today I’ll break the streak and focus on the first African-American athlete whose name was known to every American: heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson.

He was born in Galveston in 1878, less than 13 years after Juneteenth, the day Federal troops arrived in town and announced that all enslaved in Texas were now free. Johnson’s parents had both been enslaved, but he got five or six years of schooling before he had to go to work: helping his janitor father, working at the docks, and more. He took an interest in boxing as a teenager and found he had an aptitude not just for its violence, but for its finesse, that not getting hit was as great a talent as landing a punch. He was soon making real money, and by his early 20s he had gained fame as a potential contender.

But African-Americans weren’t contenders for boxing titles then. John L. Sullivan, the last of the bareknuckle champs, refused to fight a black man as champion. Neither would “Gentleman” Jim Corbett, though he had faced black fighters before he owned a title. The societal upset of a black man being the Heavyweight Champion of the World when boxing was arguably America’s most popular sports was simply too great a risk to take.

Eventually, Canadian fighter and title-holder Tommy Burns was offered enough money to give Jack Johnson a shot. Johnson was then regarded as the “World Colored Heavyweight Champion.” He had already beaten the former world title holder Bob Fitzsimmons, knocking him out in two rounds, and nearly every other challenger. The Burns-Johnson fight took place in Sydney, Australia. After 14 rounds during which the challenger led from bell to bell, the police stopped the fight, and Jack Johnson was named the new heavyweight champion of the world.

Jack London, the novelist, wrote an article about the fight for the New York Herald that made front pages nationwide. He described the fight as “a hopeless slaughter,” jeeringly calling Johnson “the Ethiopian” throughout the article. The kicker at the end of London’s piece set up the bout which remains among the most legendary ever fought. “But one thing remains,” London wrote, “Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that smile from Johnson’s face. Jeff, it’s up to you.”

London had set Jack Johnson’s first title defense up as a battle to recapture white supremacy, and the world’s press and fans followed right along. The former champion Jim Jeffries became “the Great White Hope,” the only man who could recapture the belt that most Americans believed properly belonged around the waist of a white man.

Jim Jeffries had retired from boxing in 1905, having announced that there were no challengers left to beat (excluding all the black ones). He took up farming, gained some weight, and relaxed. Jack London described him as a “Germanic tribesman and warrior of two thousand years ago,” helping to lure him back into the ring. Jeffries bit, announcing “I feel obligated to the sporting public at least to make an effort to reclaim the heavyweight championship for the white race ... I should step into the ring again and demonstrate that a white man is king of them all.”

Meanwhile, Jack Johnson was living his best life. He fought for fun. He enjoyed the company of women -- lots of women -- most of whom were white. He wore expensive clothes (and gold caps on his teeth, the “golden smile” London lampooned). He drove fast cars fast, famously handing a police officer a $100 bill for a $50 ticket and explaining he planned to speed on the way back too. He ticked people off, upset every social expectation, and answered to no one. John Ridley, an Oscar-winning screenwriter, once said that Johnson was “a guy who basically lived his life with a metaphorical middle finger raised in the air.”

Johnson and Jeffries finally met in the ring on July 4, 1910. Originally planned for San Francisco, the matchup was moved to Reno, Nevada after the governor of California withdrew permissions for the fight for fear of violence. Authorities in Reno checked firearms at the door and banned alcohol sales. Nearly 20,000 people attended in a rickety wooden amphitheatre constructed special for the event, paying up to $50 face value for tickets.

Johnson’s bout with Jeffries was touted as a battle between the races, literally hyped as an opportunity to put a wealthy, flamboyant African-American man in his place, and knock his millions of black fans down a peg. Jeffries showed up in good shape, but after a knockdown in the 14th round, he threw in the towel in the 15th rather than suffer a knockout. "I could never have whipped Johnson at my best,” Jeffries had to admit after the fight. The former champion John L. Sullivan, who had helped train Jeffries, noted that the fight was one-sided but fairly fought, saying “The fight of the century is over and a black man is the undisputed champion of the world.”

After Johnson beat Jeffries, a wave of violence against African-Americans pulsed across the country: shootings, mob actions, arson, and more. Dozens were killed, hundreds injured. Teddy Roosevelt, then out of the White House after two terms, weighed in, saying “The last contest provoked a very unfortunate display of race antagonism.” Louis Armstrong remembered being a boy and having to run from public view in the streets of New Orleans so that the mob wouldn’t beat him up for being a Jack Johnson fan.

Violence of a different sort followed Jack Johnson. His wife Etta Duryea committed suicide in 1912 after a relationship fraught with domestic abuse and mental illness. Within months of her death, Johnson began to appear publicly with 18-year-old Lucille Cameron. Cameron’s mother alleged that Johnson kidnapped her daughter, leading law enforcement to track Johnson down and charge him with several violations of the Mann Act, which forbade transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. It was a trumped up charge, one no white celebrity of the era would have faced; Johnson was found guilty in front of an all-white jury in two hours. Johnson and Cameron fled, living overseas for seven years. In 1920, Johnson returned to the U.S. and surrendered, agreeing to spend a year at Leavenworth. In the meantime, out of shape and on the run, he had also surrendered his title, losing to Jess Willard in Havana in April 1915 by knockout in the 26th round.

Johnson continued to fight until he was 60 years old, living off small purses and adulation. He died in a car accident in North Carolina in 1946; he was said to have been speeding away, enraged, from a diner that refused to serve him. He had at that point been married to his third wife for 20 years. At her funeral, asked what she loved about her late husband, Irene Pineau responded "I loved him because of his courage," she replied. "He faced the world unafraid. There wasn't anybody or anything he feared."

After the 1910 Johnson-Jeffries fight, the English boxing magazine Mirror of Life issued this silver medal to commemorate the Fight of the Century. Despite being one of the biggest celebrities of the era, black or white, few post-fight souvenirs were made to honor Johnson. Even as his accomplishments were celebrated, his lifestyle was widely reviled, both by whites to whom he served as a supportive argument for their racism and by blacks who complained his life choices served as impediments in their own struggle for equality.

While his material culture legacy is skimpy, his historical legacy far outlived him. No African-American celebrity before Jack Johnson had ever staked a claim on equality by asserting that a famous black person had every right to be as controversial as a famous white person. Before Johnson, simply being a black celebrity was controversial enough. After Johnson, African-Americans remained loathe to rock the boat, seeing the indignities that accompanied his life in the gossip pages as a cautionary tale if one wanted to succeed in White America. As Joe Louis rose the ladder of boxing’s heavyweight division two decades after Johnson gave up the title, Louis’ managers refused to let him even be photographed next to a white woman, lest he end up persecuted like the last African-American champion. Louis’ public persona was carefully crafted to be the opposite of Johnson’s: modest, quiet, staying within the boundaries of good taste at all times. Muhammad Ali took more inspiration from Johnson’s refusal to play by the rules than Louis’ willingness to stay bound by them. Were it not for Johnson, Ali’s outspoken showmanship and leadership may never have come to pass. Jack Johnson’s unapologetically led life was a revolutionary first for an African-American celebrity, but he didn’t do it for a movement, or the future, or anyone else. He did it for himself, as a man trying to get the most out of life.


February 19: Dick Gregory for President One-Dollar Note, 1968

One day after explaining why I choose to focus my historical inquiries away from athletes and entertainers, then going on a deep dive into the story behind a great African-American athlete, it’s time to focus on ... an entertainer.

On March 6, 1961, Dick Gregory made history by sitting on Jack Paar’s couch.

The Tonight Show was otherwise pretty typical that Monday night, though you might be hard pressed to find anyone who remembers anything about the other guests today (go ask your parents who Merriman Smith, Cliff Arquette, Sam Levenson, or Joan Fairfax were, I’ll wait). Plenty of African-American comics had appeared on the program before, and comics of every sort knew appearing on The Tonight Show was a major career builder, as much of a launchpad then as it was with Johnny Carson or is today.

It was the famous jazz singer Billy Eckstine who told Dick Gregory in conversation one day that plenty of black comics appear on Jack Paar’s show, but none of them are ever invited to sit on the couch: jokes, laughter, and get out. There was no casual on-camera chat after the set, no humanizing story, no questions about how the tour was going, just business and back to the dressing room.

Gregory, already a well known comic by then, watched Jack Paar religiously, but had never noticed this before. After his talk with Eckstine, he walked home, crying the entire way.

When Jack Paar called and tried to book Dick Gregory not long thereafter, Gregory hung up on the show. Twice. The third time, Jack Paar himself called and asked why he wouldn’t play the show. Gregory told him. Paar told him to come on the show. He could sit on the couch.

So he did. Dick Gregory recounted to Julian Bond years later that “my salary jumped the next day from $250 a week, seven days, to $5,000 a night.” He told Bond about the thousands of letters and phone calls that NBC received after his appearance, from the multitudes who had seen a black man joke on TV but never seen a black man just sit and talk. "So where else would a white person hear someone like you talking about other than on TV? Well, you was never there to talk, and so NBC got so many calls that day of people who just loved it that they brought me back twenty-two times."

Dick Gregory became one of the hottest comics in America. He headlined in Vegas at a time when black comics usually warmed up the crowd before a musical act. He called himself “the first flatfooter,” the first African-American funny man who just told jokes without any of the literal song and dance that had previously accompanied them. He stood in front of the crowd, impeccably dressed, and told jokes to white crowds that cut deep, evoking the headlines of the South for audiences up North. He mocked their racism without ever mentioning it, making a point to call out to a white waiter from stage and order a drink just to hear everyone gasp. And when he wasn’t on stage, he was working, on the phone with civil rights leaders, planning his next trip south, finding out the best place for him to turn up at a lunch counter, or a church, or a rally. He got arrested in Mississippi during a voter registration drive. He got arrested protesting segregation in Chicago’s Grant Park 42 years before Barack Obama delivered a victory speech there.

Forty years before Barack Obama became the first nominee of a major party for the office of President of the United States, Dick Gregory ran too. The Peace and Freedom Party was a protest party in 1968, calling attention to racism, economic and educational inequality, and the injustice of American foreign policy. Dick Gregory wanted to be carry the party’s flag, but they instead nominated Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Undeterred, Gregory founded the Freedom and Peace Party, ending up on a handful of state ballots, including those where the Peace and Freedom Party had gained ballot access but disallowed Cleaver’s candidacy because he was under 35. Forced to run a write-in campaign, Gregory ended up with 47,097 votes in the 1968 Presidential Election, topping Cleaver’s candidacy but not quite threatening Nixon, Humphrey, or Wallace.

His shoestring budget campaign couldn’t afford much outreach aside from handbills that resembled dollar bills depicting Gregory’s face and variant text like “Your vote is legal, sacred, and private” and “Take this ONE OPPORTUNITY to express your free choice, this country is redeemable.” The dollar bill lookalikes were widely distributed in Chicago, where Gregory actually had campaign staff, but turned up all over the country. Gregory estimated that over a million were printed.

Amidst reports that the handbills actually worked in some of the primitive change machines of the day, in Dick Gregory’s own words, “Federal agents entered my campaign headquarters in Tennessee and New York City and confiscated my handbills.” Some 30,000 of the handbills were carted away from the Gregory campaign in Nashville alone. Walter Cronkite tried one in the CBS break room change machine for the benefit of the broadcast cameras; the machine didn’t take it. Nevertheless, the Dick Gregory dollar bills became famous nationwide, as Secret Service agents had to go on record talking about their confiscation for news outlets of every description. The candidate himself used the police action as proof of the establishment’s unfairness and the disreputable nature of the two-party system, adding “until you put a picture of a black person’s face on American money, nothing that has my picture on it is a facsimile of American money.”

In 2016, word spread that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was working on a portrait of Harriet Tubman to appear on the $20 bill. If the current administration does not alter that plan, the Tubman bill would appear around 2026, when Dick Gregory is 94 years old.


February 20: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Cent, 1801

No matter how much African-American history you read this month or any other month, this will be the only story that starts in Canada in 1534.

The French were late arrivals to the business of colonizing the New World, but from the moment Jacques Cartier thrust a cross into the ground near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, they have never lost their foothold in this hemisphere. Even today, 12 of the 577 legislators in France’s National Assembly represent French Overseas possessions in the Americas.

In 1763, after being defeated in the Seven Years War (known in America as the French and Indian War), France was offered a deal at the treaty table: give up on North America, including all of Canada, or give up the tiny but extremely profitable sugar island of Guadeloupe. Cognizant that the North American land mass was far too large to defend, France turned Canada and what became most of the eastern United States over to Great Britain. They retained rights to several extremely valuable islands in the West Indies like Martinique, Saint Lucia, and Saint Domingue. Spain controlled the lands west of the Mississippi, including the city of New Orleans.

The island that we call Hispaniola is today divided into the nations of the Dominican Republic in the east and Haiti in the west. It was first colonized by Spain, after having been settled by Christopher Columbus himself in 1493. France took control of the western part of the island in the early 1600s and was awarded it by treaty in 1697. The French half became Saint Domingue (Haiti), while the Spanish-held east was Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic).

The first Africans were forcibly taken to Hispaniola in 1502. Like most of the West Indies, the island was soon dominated by enormous plantations run by absentee owners, which meant most of the island’s population was enslaved Africans or their descendants. By 1776, an estimated 800,000 slaves had been transported to Haiti. The population of blacks on the island outnumbered whites more than 10 to 1.

Plantations in the West Indies imposed a particularly cruel strain of slavery, with labor intensive work, miserable heat, and brutal violence to control the constant threat of insurrection. When France descended into revolution, plantation owners throughout the French West Indies were on notice, knowing the other shoe was likely to drop in the New World as it did in the Old.

Enter Vincent Ogé, a wealthy and educated native of Saint Domingue who was born free despite having one-quarter African parentage. Ogé was in France when the Revolution broke out and was paying careful attention when the National Assembly declared, in August 1789, that “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” He returned to Saint Domingue in late 1790 with a supply of arms (which were likely acquired in the United States) to form a body of men to rise up against the white planters and the institution of slavery. At least some of his men had significant battle experience, having served in the American Revolution in the Chasseurs-Volontaires de couleur de Saint-Domingue, a unit entirely composed of free black men who distinguished themselves at the siege of Savannah in 1778 and remained in service in the United States until the Battle of Yorktown.

Vincent Ogé’s planned rebellion failed. He escaped the western part of the island, but was captured and brutally executed in March 1791. His head was displayed on a stake as a warning. The rest of 1791 brought forth a torrent of violence on the island: the uprising of a few thousands slaves became widespread insurrection. The two biggest cities, Le Cap and Port-Au-Prince were burned to the ground. By the end of the year, nearly 100,000 rebel slaves had formed an army. Among their leaders was a former slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture. Then 48 years old, he had been free for 15 years.

The next several years became a whirlwind of war. France declared the slaves of Saint Domingue emancipated in 1793 as an attempt to stop the rebellion, but the violence continued unabated. Spanish forces from the east side of the island intervened. The English arrived, attempted a takeover, and left again, conquered by disease more than anything else. L’Ouverture had found himself fighting both for and against both the French and Spanish. Eventually he fought for no one but the blacks of Saint Domingue.

It’s unclear exactly when L’Ouverture, by this time known as Louverture, became the de factor ruler of Saint Domingue, but it was at about the same time Napoleon became the most powerful man in France. In 1801, a new constitution was passed which named Louverture governor general of the island for life. Napoleon, feeling a bit threatened, sent 20,000 troops to restore full French control soon thereafter.

Meanwhile, Napoleon had secretly reclaimed the Louisiana Territory from Spain in 1800, a fact that became evident to American authorities just as Louverture was rising to authority over all of Saint Domingue. The international intrigue was clear: Napoleon was a mortal threat to the Americas. He could threaten the United States from the West and from the West Indies, and stop American shipping on the Mississippi, which had been guaranteed since a 1795 treaty with Spain. All of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys could be bankrupted, even starved.

New President Thomas Jefferson realized that the question of French power in Louisiana was intimately tied to the status of the rebellion on Saint Domingue. He wrote in June 1802 “Though I take for granted that the colonization of Louisiana by France is a settled point, yet I suspect they must be much stronger in St. Domingo before they can spare troops to go there.” Jefferson was right: Louverture’s rebellion was delaying Napoleon’s reoccupation of Louisiana. Tens of thousands of French troops were sent to Saint Domingue, but no such force was sent to the American mainland.

Though Louverture was captured in June 1802, the rebellion he helped form continued. As town after town fell away from French control, and tropical disease destroyed entire French regiments, Napoleon could see he was losing the island for good. When Robert Livingston and James Monroe arrived in his court early in 1803, intent on reaching an agreement on American navigation on the Mississippi, they were stunned when Napoleon instead offered to sell them the whole of the Louisiana Territory. Saint Domingue was once profitable but now was reduced to ruin, and Napoleon could scarcely add Louisiana to his docket. Instead, the sale of the territory would add a useful cash infusion to France’s treasury and remove one more risk from his portfolio.

In 1915, W.E.B. Du Bois’ book “The Negro” included a long passage on the importance of Haiti. Quoting the preacher DeWitt Talmage, Du Bois wrote “praise, if you will, the work of a Robert Livingstone or a Jefferson, but to-day let us not forget our debt to Toussaint L'Ouverture, who was indirectly the means of America's expansion by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.”

Haiti declared its independence on January 1, 1804, becoming the second nation in the Americas to throw off European colonizers. Every leader of its hard-won battle for sovereignty had been a former slave. Were it not for the upheaval they wrought, those of you reading these words today from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains might be translating them into your native French.

In 1801, Louverture’s government made copies of French coins from the early 1790s, the heyday of the French Revolution. There were many different types of French coins circulating in Saint Domingue in 1801, and Louverture could have copied any of them. His choice from among those many designs is depicted here, with a Liberty cap, wreath of victory, and scales of justice on one side, while the other side showed a legal tablet reading “Les Hommes Sont Egaux Devant La Loi” or “All men are equal before the law.”