In 1492, Columbus Landed On Ayita (now Haiti)

I found this book by Pulitzer prize
winning author especially revealing 
regarding US policy toward Haiti.

I was intrigued by a reference in Garry Wills book about Thomas Jefferson's refusal, as a citizen of a southern slaveholding state, to recognize the revolutionary new black government of Haiti during his presidency. This added to my curiosity about how that long standing policy, unchanged until 1862, may have affected Haiti's ill-fated history. 

As background, the island on which Haiti is located is where Christopher Columbus planted the first European flag and lay claim to land long inhabited by a native Taino and Arawakan people.The French later built a large settlement there in the 18th century and established huge plantations employing slave labor. As a result the French profited from enormous amounts of indigo, cotton and raw sugar exports, according to Wikipedia, and by the end of the century were involved in a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade.

Then in 1791, not long after the US colonies successfully gained independence from the English crown, slaves staged the successful Haitian Revolution. In its aftermath as many as 5000 French occupiers, men, women and children, were brutally massacred.

Meanwhile, Jefferson endorsed the formal recognition of the new French Republic after the 1792 revolution that overthrew the monarchy of Louis XVI. This resulted in the massacres of well over three times as many French as died in the aftermath of the Haitian uprising.

According to Wills, Timothy Pickering, a former Secretary of War and later a senator from Massachusetts, decried the double standard Jefferson applied to the two nations, one led by white Europeans and the other by black former slaves, as follows:

Dessalines is pronounced by some to be a ferocious tyrant; but whatever atrocities may have been committed under his authority have been surpassed, have they equalled in their nature (for in their extent they are comparatively nothing), those of the French Revolution, when "infuriated men were seeking," as you once said,. through blood and slaughter" their long lost liberty? ...If Frenchmen, who were more free than the subjects of any monarchs in Europe, the English excepted, could find in you the apologist for cruel excesses of of which the world has furnished no example, are the hapless, the wretched Haitians ("guilty indeed of skin not colored like our own), emancipated by a great national act and declared free--are they, after enjoying freedom for many years, having maintained it in arms, resolved to live free or die; are these men not merely to be abandoned to their own efforts but to be deprived of those necessary supplies which for a series of years, they have been accustomed to receive from the United States and without which they cannot subsist? (Wills, p.44)

To be clear, as a follower of Jesus I do not support armed violence of any kind by any individual or any nation, but this does raise the question of how a more just US foreign policy may have led to a different Haiti than the unimaginably dysfunctional and impoverished one we see today. 

And to what extent might ethnicity or skin color still affect our relationships with other nations?