As 1805 slipped into 1806, the law of nations was proving inhospitable to new black nations; sovereign Haiti was being reframed as an eternal rogue colony. When Dessalines attempted to build Haiti's economic, military, and cultural strength through international trade, demographic development, and publication of state documents, increasingly the wider world received the new nation not as the triumph of right and a stunning innovation, but as an inherent subversion of the racialized power hierarchies that were the basis of Euro-American prosperity. Could a former colony survive as the first free black nation in an international sphere without seeking political safe havens and partners in trade, not just among slave-holding and/or colonized states that normally depended on racial segregation, but among fellow anticolonial states—anticolonial states that were not yet in existence? The specter of Haitian transnational subversion, of a Haitian attempt not just to declare independence but also to spread it to other nearby populations, was alarmingly plausible to European colonists and metropoles. It is also what is most difficult to trace in terms of actual evidence; unlike the philosophically stunning narratives Dessalines was disseminating throughout the U.S., this is a text one must read between the lines.

My paradigm of Haitian revolutionary literary history broadens in this chapter to include largely uninscribed “texts” as a part of the larger field of narratives by slaves and former slaves. These “texts” bridge the gap between printed genres like the Anglophone slave narrative or the carefully crafted literary and political self-representations of Haitian leaders in the Euro- American media, and the oblique evidence of the actual, planned, and rumored slave insurgencies that played out on the historical rather than the literary stage, like the planned insurrection of Denmark Vesey on the Carolina coast, which was believed to have been influenced by Haitian connections and models. Few documents represent the identities and intentions of partic-ipants in isolated insurgent movements, who generally depend on stealth for survival. A cracked mirror of statements, correspondence, legal documents, and journalism provides the eclectic inscription, from mostly hostile points of view, of their activities. There is a fine line between documentation of participants’ intentions and the contiguous domain of slaveholders’ fears and political exploitation of slave rebellion.