Philadelphia’s Trade with Saint Domingue/Haiti

This dataset offers users access to nearly 4500 voyages between ports in the French colony of Saint Domingue (and then the independent nation of Haiti) and Philadelphia between 1789 and 1819. With some exceptions, each record includes the voyage’s starting and ending points, the date of departure and/or arrival, the name of the captain and vessel, the vessel’s rigging, registry, and tonnage, the merchants having an interest in the cargo, and the cargo’s makeup. The lion’s share of this information was derived from various sources in the records of the Philadelphia Customs House, housed at the National Archives Mid-Atlantic Regional Branch office in Philadelphia (Record Group 36). Within that collection, the dataset aggregates from the volumes of the Record of Arrivals and Clearances (E1057) and the boxes of Inward & Outward & Coastwise Manifests (E1059B). The data was also gathered from the volumes of the Outward books (E1126) housed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the microfilmed records of the Philadelphia Health Officer’s Register (roll 0860) and Register of Vessels arrivals and clearances and Pilot’s Reports (roll 0864). For a number of records, further information was gleaned from manuscript sources at the Independence Seaport Museum (Dutilh Papers) and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Gillingham and Gratz collections). Portions of these data stand behind some of my published work treating the ways in which political discourse in the nascent United States was shaped by the unfolding events in Saint Domingue/Haiti. Further explorations and suggestions are introduced in this story map [https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/59e4b43f83124238bbd274a97bb54c33].