alternatehistory.com

In January 1804, under the orders of Jean Jacques Dessalines, a massacre was carried out by freed slaves against their former French overlords. Armed with knives and bayonets, entire white families were butchered by squads of Haitian soldiers, even those whites who sympathized with the Haitians were slaughtered. Women and children were among the victims. By the end of the violence in April of that year, 5,000 people had been murdered and the Haitian whites had been eradicated, with only a few exceptions made such as doctors and professionals and a small group of German colonists who had arrived before the revolution.


In a official proclamation in April 1804, Dessalines would later say ""We have given these true cannibals war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage. Yes, I have saved my country, I have avenged America",

Dessalines' secretary was even more blatant about the celebration of the violence. "For our declaration of independence, we should have the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen!"

In the 1805 constitution, all citizens were defined as "black," and white men were banned from owning land.

Understandably, this violence sent a chill down the spines of American slave owners. They believed that if the slaves were ever freed in the south, then there would be a repeat of 'the horrors of Santo Domingo' within the continental United States.

In the run-up to the U.S. presidential election of 1860, Roger B. Taney, wrote "I remember the horrors of St. Domingo" and said that the election "will determine whether anything like this is to be visited upon our own southern countrymen." (FYI, Roger Taney was the Supreme Court judge who ruled in favour of Dred Scott's owner in Dred Scott V Sandford)

The closest that the US came to something resembling Haiti was in Nat Turner's 1831 slave rebellion, in which the black rebels butchered sixty whites, using the same weapons as in Haiti-knives, hatchets, axes and other blunt instruments. But the rebellion was small, with only seventy slaves taking part and the rebellion was localized within Southampton County, Virginia.

But, at the risk of going into ASB territory, let's imagine that somehow, the rebellion sets off a firestorm across the South. It is crushed by the US Army and state militias, but before it is, hundreds of whites are dead at the hands of slaves. Instead of just being another slave rebellion, the whites see this as a attempted genocide of their race by their slaves.

What happens next to the United States as a result of this?
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