Diplomacy in Black and White John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance

"This will be the first monograph-length study of U.S. diplomacy toward Saint-Domingue during the Adams administration. The book offers a detailed examination of the relationship between U.S. President John Adams and Toussaint Louverture, military commander of the French colony Saint-Domingue. Ronald Johnson presents the complex history of the bilateral relations between these two Atlantic leaders representing the first diplomatic relationship the United States had with a government of black leaders. Over the course of seven chapters, Johnson looks beyond the diplomacy itself to find the long lasting effects it had on the evolving meanings of race, the struggles over emancipation, and the formation of an African identity in the Atlantic world. Johnson argues that this brief moment of cross-cultural cooperation, while not changing racial traditions immediately, helped to set the stage for incremental changes in American and Atlantic world discussions of race well into the twentieth-century. Diplomacy in Black and White suggests that President John Adams and his administration abetted the idea of independence for people of color on the island of Hispaniola. This proposal represents an interpretative shift in the historiography. The book illuminates U.S. diplomacy in Saint-Domingue to explain how Americans and Dominguans worked together as relatively equal partners, occupying a similar position within a volatile Atlantic context"--