Black Hero: Toussaint L'Ouverture in Antebellum American Literature and Culture

FAIN: FT-51236-03

Susan Belasco
University of Nebraska, Lincoln (Lincoln, NE 68503-2427)

My project is to complete the third chapter of a book-length study of how representations of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution shaped antebellum American attitudes toward slavery and race. This chapter, Toussaint and the Abolitionists, focuses on the ways in which Toussaint and Haiti served as a touchstone for Henry Highland Garnet, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lydia Maria Child, and Margaret Fuller.