Joseph Bunel

Joseph R. E. Bunel was a representative of the Haitian Revolutionary Government, who negotiated the first trade agreement between his nation and the United States, in 1799.

Born in France, he became a merchant and plantation manager in Cap-Français, Saint-Domingue (now Cap-Haïtien, Haiti). Although white and a slave-holder, his wife, Marie Fanchette Estève, was a free-black Creole, and he was sympathetic to the 1791 Haitian Revolution through which the former-colony won its independence from France. He served as a diplomatic and trade envoy for Governor Toussaint Louverture, a self-educated former slave. He did the same for Louverture's successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

He played an important administrative role in Louverture's regime, drafting trade and non-aggression agreements between Saint-Domingue and the United States and Great Britain. Louverture trusted Bunel enough to make him the country's Paymaster General.

In July 1798, the United States rescinded its treaties with France, beginning two years of low-level conflict known as the Quasi-War. L'Ouverture saw this breach as an opportunity.

In early-December 1798, Bunel came to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, then the capital of the United States, to try to end the American trade embargo against Saint-Domingue. He met and dined with Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, and was invited to meet President John Adams. In early-January 1799, he dined with Adams.

Debate in Congress over "Toussaint's Clause" focused on the consequences of legitimizing a revolutionary government run by former-slaves, and how American slave-holders would be endangered by interaction between their slaves and Saint-Dominguans. Pennsylvania Congressman Albert Gallatin appealed to racial prejudice in his notorious "Black Speech" (January 21, 1799), using Bunel (who had brought his wife with him) as an example of miscegenation taking place in Philadelphia:

"The General [L'Ouverture] is black, and his agent here is married to a black woman in this city."

Congress passed "Toussaint's Clause," and the Bunels returned to Saint-Domingue in mid-February.

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