Just six years after the United States shook off its colonial ruler, rebels in the French colony of St. Domingue staged their own uprising. From 1791 to 1804, revolutionaries fought the French forces, finally establishing the Republic of Haiti. As historian Gerald Horne writes, far from recognizing a kinship with their fellow freedom fighters, leaders of the early US republic were terrified about the domestic implications.

George Washington expressed concern about the potentially international “spirit of revolt among the blacks.” Once started, he mused, “where it will stop, it is difficult to say.”

His fear, of course, was that it would not stop before it hit his own country. Just days after the outbreak of fighting, the governor of South Carolina wrote Washington to warn him how “nearly similar” conditions in St. Domingue were to those in his state, where white enslavers were also outnumbered by potentially rebellious Africans.

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Frederick Douglass' Lecture on Haiti