The history of anti-Haitian sentiment in the United States stretches back to the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, when Haiti’s enslaved population bravely overthrew French colonial rule and declared their independence. It was a monumental victory for the global abolitionist movement. Yet this triumph sent shock waves through American society, striking fear into the hearts of slaveholders and their political allies, who wielded considerable influence over the nation’s major newspapers.
Instead of celebrating Haiti’s historic uprising, the US media painted it as a dangerous contagion spreading from the Caribbean, threatening to infect the United States with notions of black rebellion and social upheaval. Haitian leaders like Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Jean-Pierre Boyer were vilified as threats to social order, fueling deep-seated racist fears that aimed to preserve the institution of slavery at any cost.
During and after the Haitian Revolution, the US press frequently reported on the supposed barbarism and primitiveness of Haiti and its people. Indeed, stories have circulated about Haitians eating animals and practicing cannibalism since the country’s founding. These accounts appeared in novels, travel narratives, and newspapers, often linking such practices to Vodou religious rituals and invoking terms like “cannibal Haiti” and “cannibal republic” to describe the nation.
In the 1884 Hayti or the Black Republic, Sir Spenser St John, a British diplomat, offered sensational accounts of alleged cannibalistic practices in Haiti, mostly based on rumors and hearsay. In a chapter titled “Vaudoux [sic] Worship and Cannibalism,” he writes, “There is no subject of which it is more difficult to treat than Vaudoux worship and the cannibalism that too often accompanies its rites.” Washington, DC’s Evening Star reported in 1902: “Vaudoux [sic] is cannibalism in the second stage. In the first instance, a savage eats human flesh as an extreme form of triumph over an enemy; the appetite grows until the food is offered to anyone.”
Stories of cannibalism and animal consumption were also propagated by US presidents during and after the Haitian Revolution. Thomas Jefferson, enslaver of more than six hundred people in his Monticello plantation, was US president during and after the revolution. He is often cited for disparaging the formerly enslaved people of Haiti as “cannibals of the terrible republic,” and historians argue his racist views influenced his isolationist policy toward Haiti.