James Alexander Dun

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James Alexander Dun | "What avenues of commerce, will you, Americans, not explore!": Commercial Philadelphia's Vantage onto the Early Haitian Revolution | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3 | The History Cooperative

"What avenues of commerce, will you, Americans, not explore!": Commercial Philadelphia's Vantage onto the Early Haitian Revolution

IN 1860, seeking to demonstrate Philadelphia's rise to commercial prowess in the late eighteenth century, Abraham Ritter told a story about that city and Saint Domingue. Writing in "the downhill of life," he recalled a tale from his youth about the voyage of the schooner Fly to "St. Domingo" in the early 1790s.¹ The French colony had been "a fruitful source of life to the commercial interests of Philadelphia," Ritter explained, but had become "embargoed by the savage hatred of the blacks against the whites" after the slave uprisings there. Nevertheless, the Fly's owner, Abraham Piesch, risked a cargo. The schooner's captain, Wallace, "scented by the rich odor of the garden" before him, found a white official on the island's beaches. The "decrepit survivor of his race," this man had been spared death, yet the insurgents had "marred and mutilated ... his fingers and toes, and nose too, to prevent his escape and secure his services to whatever commercial interest might turn up." Wallace negotiated, and a sale was made. The apples, onions, lard, and other foodstuffs the Fly bore were traded for coffee, which was "poured like sand into the hold" to the extent that the crew had to wade through it to reach their bunks. The vessel's return garnered great profits for Piesch and Wallace; for Ritter, it supplied a sturdy testament to the vibrant spirit of Philadelphia's mercantile community.²

Ritter learned this story from his father, Jacob, who had served as the Fly's supercargo. Either in the hearing or the recounting, it was factually flawed. Jacob Ritter did not travel to Saint Domingue in the early 1790s. He entered the employ of Piesch in 1801. The Frenchman with whom he and Wallace dealt, therefore (assuming he existed at all), was likely a survivor of Jean-Jacques Dessalines's purges in 1804. On February 14 of that year, the older Ritter arrived in Philadelphia from Jacmel on a schooner called Fly, though the vessel was owned by J. W. Foussatt and John F. Dumas, and was captained by Jeremiah Norris.³ The readers of Abraham Ritter's narrative, however, would probably not have been troubled by such details. By 1860 Saint Domingue had become a byword for slave revolt in many American minds and had developed into a trope for the massacre of whites. In the wake of the Denmark Vesey trials in 1822, for instance, a South Carolinian expressed relief that Charleston had averted "a war of extermination to their fellow-citizens, their wives, and children, as was the case in St. Domingo." Faithful to this understanding, Ritter depicted the insurgents as a barbaric and inhuman force, and assumed his audience's understanding of them was the same. Indeed this like-mindedness was important to his larger project in delivering a message about (and to) Philadelphia: her savvy merchants had taken deadly risks to make their city great.⁴

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