On 10 July 1820 the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson wrote a thirtyone- page letter to the King of Haiti, Henry Christophe, in which he provided a detailed account of his recent trip to France at the behest of the King. He had gone there, in the words of his mission statement, to discover ‘the bases upon which a solid and durable peace may be built’ between Haiti and its former colonial master. Clarkson's letter to the King was one of dozens that had been exchanged between the two men since the initiation of their correspondence in 1815. Over the course of the intervening five years, Clarkson had become a veritable ‘good-will ambassador for Christophe’ (Griggs, 71), promoting his cause in Britain and singing his praises to foreign leaders such as the Emperor of Russia, Alexander I. By 1820, as the mission to Paris attests, this ‘ambassadorial’ status had gained an official dimension, the Englishman having been ‘authorized’ to make overtures to the French government on Christophe's behalf, ‘leaving to the discretion of Mr. Thomas Clarkson the choice of the means and avenue of approach’ (Griggs and Prator, 175). Given that the King's ‘sine qua non condition’ for any negotiations with the ‘King of France and Navarre’ was that he ‘recognize Haiti… as a free, sovereign, and independent state; that he deal with Haiti as such; and that on his own behalf and in the name of his heirs and successors he renounce all claims to political, property, and territorial rights over Haiti or any part thereof’, and that Christophe had ruled out from the start ‘any indemnification of the ex-colonists’ (175), Clarkson and the influential abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and James Stephen with whom he consulted in the days leading up to his trip to France recognized the ‘hopeless’ nature of the treaty that Christophe was pursuing. Clarkson thus informed the King, in a letter of 28 April written days before he left for France, that he had chosen to travel there ‘not as a public agent but in his own individual capacity’, with the goal of ascertaining ‘the particular disposition and state of France as they relate to Hayti’ (198).