Secret History: Haiti and the South

I am taking both Civil War and Modern France classes for my minor so I have had multiple perspectives on the slave revolts in Haïti. The following short essay on the how they affected the Antebellum South Comes from my notes from both classes that gives necessary background knowledge for Secret History.

The slave revolt in Haïti brought about both fear and panic within the American South In the South, white planters viewed the revolution as a large-scale slave revolt and feared that violence in Haïti could inspire similar revolts in the plantation South.  They then began to have stricter policies on black gatherings, and always had a white overseer in order to prevent any rebellions from rising up. There were far more blacks on the plantations in the Antebellum South than there were whites so the plantation owners feared being overrun and murdered. Another fear that the South held was the fact that Haïti had an official policy of accepting any black person who arrived on their shores as a citizen.The legislatures of Pennsylvania and South Carolina, as well as the Washington administration, sent help to the French whites of Saint-Domingue in order to help destroy the revolts and reinforce the heirarchy within Haïti. In the debate over whether theU.S.should embargo Haïti, John Taylor of South Carolina spoke for much of the popular sentiment of white people in the South. To him the Haïtian revolution was evidence for the idea that "slavery should be permanent in the United States." He argued against the idea that slavery had caused the revolution, but instead suggested that "the antislavery movement had provoked the revolt in the first place." This shows shows how white attitudes shifted in the south from one of reluctantly accepting slavery as a necessity, to one of seeing it as a fundamental aspect of southern culture and the slave-owning planter class. As the years progressed Haïti only became a bigger target for scorn among the pro-slavery factions in the south. It was taken as proof that "violence was  an inherent part of the character of blacks" due to the slaughtering of French whites, and the authoritarian rule that followed the end of the revolution - while this logical fallacy required ignoring the violent and authoritarian rule of white people over enslaved Africans, as well as its psychological effects on those Africans