Diplomacy in Black and White

Ronald Angelo Johnson’s Diplomacy in Black and White offers a new, compelling, and highly readable account of an important episode in the early history of American foreign policy.

* author of Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World’s Most Popular Form of Government *

John Adams’s presidency and Saint Domingue’s revolutionary regime rarely get the attention they deserve in explaining the acquisition of Louisiana and shifts in the slavery debates in the United States. Ronald Angelo Johnson’s carefully argued and persuasive new book gives us an illuminating take on the equal partnership forged between the Adams administration and Toussaint Louverture—a fascinating and original study of diplomacy across the color line.

* author of Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr *

With this incredible story of diplomacy and race during the Age of Revolution, Ronald Angelo Johnson deepens our understanding of the American paradox of race. We learn of a startling moment of realpolitik in Atlantic history when the white representatives of the proslavery republic collaborated with the black revolutionists who fought for the creation of Haiti. Gracefully written and thoroughly researched, Johnson's book shows how for twenty-one months in the final years of the eighteenth century, the making of Haiti depended upon cross-racial collaboration that ended only with the election of Thomas Jefferson.

* author of The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War *

This intriguing analysis of trade and diplomacy between the United States during the presidency of John Adams and St. Domingue under Toussaint Louverture shows how pragmatism tinged with occasional idealism overcame racism while slavery still dominated much of the new North American nation. It is full of surprising details!

* author of Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina *

[U]ntil Johnson, no one has thought fit to isolate for detailed study this remarkable story of transracial cooperation and overseas military intervention, a high-water mark of progressive American foreign policy that has not always been matched in the years since. A former State Department officer, Johnson brings to his considerable skills of historical narrative and interpretation an insider’s feel for the ambivalences of American diplomatic power.

* Journal of Southern History *

Historians of the early American republic and of revolutionary Saint-Domingue will relish the minute description and analysis of the diplomatic moves between the two nations. Less specialized readers will likely enjoy the way in which Johnson adds little details based on no documentary evidence at all, which turns his very scholarly work into a breathtaking narrative.

* American Historical Review *

Johnson has provided a fresh look at the Atlantic world that delivers more than it promises...Johnson has opened a new door on the study of inter-American diplomacy, which other historians should enter.

* Journal of American Ethnic Histo