Secret History: or, The Horrors of St. Domingo in a Series of Letters … (Philadelphia, 1808): Saint-Domingue through the Lens of an American Woman on the Eve of Haitian Independence

Abstract:This article analyzes Leonora Sansay's epistolary novel Secret History: or, The Horrors of St Domingo in a Series of Letters … (Philadelphia, 1808). Through her letters and the lens of an outsider, Sansay highlights Saint-Domingue's strategic place in the Americas as a site of global slavery. The letters shed light on French society's obsession with the theatrics of performance. That society was so preoccupied by a life of debauchery that it ignored the fact that the colony was literally falling apart. The theatrics that Sansay describes parallel Michel-Rolph Trouillot's theory of how power and silence operate. Since it was unthinkable for the French to comprehend, let alone accept, that slaves could have the desire for freedom and fight to obtain that freedom, it made sense for them to ignore the signs of revolt. Sansay also found it unthinkable that the French could not control their colony of former slaves.