Gulliver's Travels was the work of a writer who had been using satire as his medium for over a quarter of a century. His life was one of continual disappointment, and satire was his complaint and his defense — against his enemies and against humankind. People, he believed, were generally ridiculous and petty, greedy and proud; they were blind to the "ideal of the mean." This ideal of the mean was present in one of Swift's first major satires, The Battle of the Books (1697). There, Swift took the side of the Ancients, but he showed their views to be ultimately as distorted as those of their adversaries, the Moderns. In Gulliver's last adventure, Swift again pointed to the ideal of the mean by positioning Gulliver between symbols of sterile reason and symbols of gross sensuality. To Swift, Man is a mixture of sense and nonsense; he had accomplished much but had fallen far short of what he could have been and what he could have done.
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This is how the authors use historical details to support the claim that US political leaders’ positions on slavery impacted the relations between the US and Haiti:
- by describing John Adams' actions to support Haiti in its fight against the French. President Adams was opposed to slavery in principle (he thought it was the against the values of republicanism) and in practice (he did not own any). This probably explains his decision to "sen[d] guns and supplies" to Haiti in the self-liberated slaves' rebellion against French colonists.
- by quoting Thomas Jefferson’s views on the dangers of enslaved Haitians rebelling. Indeed, the text tells us that "Jefferson ... was terrified by the success of the Haitian revolution." This position by the new president impacted the US' relation with Haiti because Haiti was viewed "only as a threat" and not as a sister republic.
- by illustrating Thomas Jefferson’s view that the Haitian rebellion could lead to a rebellion of the enslaved in America. This is the continuation of the previous answer. The authors write that Jefferson "expected ex-slaves from the island to spread into America, preaching ... rebellion to the slaves." Another sentence repeats this claim: "if Haitians could claim their freedom ... , why couldn't slaves within the United States do the same thing?"
