interstate commerce in slaves.

The West Indies and Mexico were also closely associated with the
United States in the matter of slavery. When Jamestown was
founded, negro slavery was already an old institution in the
islands of the Caribbean Sea, and thence came the first slaves to
Virginia. The abolition of slavery in the island of Hayti, or San
Domingo, was accomplished during the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic Wars. As incidental to the process of emancipation,
the Caucasian inhabitants were massacred or banished, and a
republican government was established, composed exclusively of
negroes and mulattoes. From the date of the Missouri Compromise
to that of the Mexican War, this island was united under a single
republic, though it was afterwards divided into the two republics
of Hayti and San Domingo.

The "horrors of San Domingo" were never absent from the minds of
those in the United States who lived in communities composed
chiefly of slaves. What had happened on the island was accepted
by Southern planters as proof that the two races could live
together in peace only under the relation of master and slave,
and that emancipation boded the extermination of one race or the
other. Abolitionists, however, interpreted the facts differently:
they emphasized the tyranny of the white rulers as a primary
cause of the massacres; they endowed some of the negro leaders
with the highest qualities of statesmanship and self-sacrificing
generosity; and Wendell Phillips, in an impassioned address which
he delivered in 1861, placed on the honor roll above the chief
worthies of history--including Cromwell and Washington Toussaint
L'Ouverture, the liberator of Hayti, whom France had betrayed and