Between 1791 and 1810, more than 25,000 refugees arrived on American shores from the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the modern-day nation of Haiti. Their homes and plantations, which were the engine behind the world’s most profitable colony in 1790, had been consumed by a bloody conflict that began as an appeal for racial equality, and ended in what historian David Geggus has called “the largest and sole fully successful [slave revolt] there has ever been." Disembarking in cities including Philadelphia, Charleston and New Orleans in waves, some with slaves in tow and others with nothing, these supplicants embodied the first refugee crisis in United States history.
The initial wave of emigration from Saint-Domingue began as more than 450,000 slaves took up arms against their masters, setting fire to the island’s plantations and townhomes. Port-au-Prince was reduced to cinders in November of 1791. The revolution’s early leaders had sown the seeds of revolt over months of covert interplantation recruitment, and within the first few weeks of fighting, more than 1,000 slaveowners were killed. In 1793, the capital at Cap Français was razed, Great Britain and Spain entered the conflict and French general Leger Felicite Sonthonax abolished slavery in the hopes of regaining control of the colony. This plan failed, and Sonthonax fled the island before the year's end, leaving a complicated fray behind him. By 1804, Saint-Domingue was no more, and the free, black republic of Haiti reigned in its place.
Consequently, whites, mulattos and free blacks who did not support the end of the plantation regime, along with a few thousand slaves forced to join them, scrambled to board departing vessels. White or black, those who left of their own volition had been planters, artisans, printers, blacksmiths and tailors, but whether they were rich or poor beforehand, all became refugees upon departure.
While some sought asylum nearby in Jamaica and Cuba, thousands began turning up in the harbors of the nascent United States as well. In Philadelphia, for example, what began with 15 refugees aboard a ship called the Charming Sally in 1791 turned into a flood of more than 3,000 refugees by 1794. As events on Saint-Domingue intensified over the next decade, similar influxes occurred at ports in Virginia, South Carolina, Maryland and Louisiana. In 1810 alone, 10,000 refugess arrived in New Orleans; expelled from their first refuge in Cuba, they doubled the city's population in a matter of months.
The newly minted American government’s first response to the crisis was to provide aid to whites still on the island. George Washington’s administration, filled with slaveholders including the chief executive and his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, extended $726,000 and a modest amount of military support to the colony’s planters. Jefferson, who did not support direct intervention, still opposed the rebellion, stating that "the reestablishment of peace and commerce...and the free exchange of our mutual productions” were vital to the American economy. Sugar and coffee produced in Saint-Domingue were highly valued by American consumers, and the food and finished goods that American merchants furnished in return constituted one of the young nation's most important trade relationships.