Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo: IN A SERIES OF LETTERS, WRITTEN
Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St.Domingo is one of the most vivid eyewitness accounts of the Haitian Revolution, told through a series of letters dispatched in 1802 from Cap‑Français to the American vice‑president, Aaron Burr. In this modern republication the text is presented complete and unabridged from the scarce 1808 Philadelphia edition, restored with scrupulous fidelity to the original punctuation and spelling, yet supported by a full scholarly apparatus that renders the narrative newly accessible to twenty‑first‑century readers.
Sansay—an American‑born Creole moving uneasily among planters, refugees, and French officers—writes at the instant Napoleon’s expeditionary army collapses under guerrilla resistance and yellow fever. Her letters interweave ballroom intrigues with night‑time massacres, domestic abuse with imperial politics, revealing how colonial violence penetrates the most private of spaces. Long admired for its gothic intensity, the work gains fresh resonance today as historians seek voices that register the revolution’s sensory and emotional textures, especially those of women whose perspectives were almost universally excluded from official dispatches.
This edition situates Sansay’s testimony within a richly contextual framework. A new foreword traces the author’s relationship with Burr, explores her ambivalent racial politics, and explains how her correspondence circulated in early‑Republic print culture. A modern preface introduces readers to the latest historiography on Saint‑Domingue, mapping how Sansay’s narrative converses with Haitian writers such as Toussaint Louverture, Baron deVastey, Thomas Madiou, and Beaubrun Ardouin, and demonstrates why her letters remain indispensable for understanding the gendered and trans‑imperial dimensions of the Atlantic revolutions. Detailed annotations clarify military events, identify dramatis personae, and gloss Creole idioms; a bibliographical essay points toward newly digitized Caribbean newspapers, civil registers, and Haitian‑authored memoirs that allow students and scholars to extend their research far beyond the boundaries of the printed page.
Designed for both general readers and academic study, the volume includes a historical chronology, a map of late‑colonial Saint‑Domingue overlaying Sansay’s itinerary, and a modernized index of names and places. The newly commissioned cover art evokes early‑nineteenth‑century bookbinding while foregrounding the novel’s central figure—a woman observing a ruined colonial streetscape—thereby signaling the work’s fusion of intimate witness and geopolitical upheaval.
Secret History emerges here not merely as an antiquarian curiosity but as a living document that compels us to confront the entanglement of race, gender, and power in the making of the modern Atlantic world. By returning Sansay’s voice to print in a form equal to its historical and literary importance, this edition invites contemporary audiences to experience the Haitian struggle for freedom through the eyes of a participant whose anxieties and insights remain startlingly relevant to our own unsettled age.
