While in some respects ‘Theresa, a Haytien Tale’ (1828) is quite conventional in its portrayal of a free woman of color living in revolutionary Saint-Domingue, Madame Paulina, who seeks to preserve the virtue of her daughters at all costs, in other respects, the serialized short story is quite radical in its suggestion that this same woman's daughter, Theresa, was ultimately responsible for the independence of Haiti. While Zelica uses female revolutionaries of color largely to critique the violence of the Haitian Revolution and to express anxieties about “miscegenation,” ‘Theresa’ uses what is described by its author as the very ‘agency’ (644) of its eponymous female protagonist of color in order to enter into a conversation about the place of “non-white” women in both the Haitian Revolution and the pre-Civil War project of “racial” uplift in the United States. As one of the first two short stories written in publication outlets designed primarily for writers of color, and both of which are set in Saint-Domingue, ‘Theresa’ punctuates the interest and relevance of Haiti for the antebellum African American community; but by portraying its heroine, Theresa, as the hero of the Haitian Revolution and thus as responsible for the subsequent independence of Haiti, the tale fills a lacuna in writing about the Haitian Revolution circulating in the U.S., as well as in the broader Atlantic World, which often remained silent on the subject of female revolutionaries who fought on the side of the Haitian revolutionists.

As an anonymously published short story that takes a heroic woman of color as its primary protagonist and was published in a primarily African American venue, ‘Theresa’ is probably one of the least well-known nineteenth-century representations of the Haitian Revolution. Because of its content and the circumstances under which it was published, however, it is also perhaps one of the most important.