Haitian Realities and the Emigrants’ Return

This chapter focuses on the emigrants' return to their home nation. In all, emigrants returned home for similar reasons: unforeseen hardship, disease, and a clash between reality and what they had been led to believe. Disillusionment came in the form of a regime that failed to live up to its promise to uphold republican rights of equal citizenship and an economic landscape that discouraged rather than encouraged commercial enterprise. It was as if all the Americans' expectations were punctured one by one in Haiti's declining economy and failed diplomatic policy. For Boyer, the emigration was an enormous disappointment. It failed to bring about the desired result—American recognition.

The Marketing of Haiti

This chapter looks at the newspapers that were central to those who were advocating a change in the relationship between Haiti and the United States. These newspapers were filled with reports about Haiti and Haitian leaders, including public proclamations, the “progress” of the island, and the commercial opportunities. Even reports that focused on trade offered accounts of Haiti's government and current events as context. Editors such as Hezekiah Niles and Benjamin Lundy and countless others contributed to this public file on Haiti. Niles published Niles' Weekly Register and prided himself on the paper's impartiality in an era when newspapers understood their role as representing particular political parties. Benjamin Lundy, the most famous American abolitionist in the 1820s, also lived in Baltimore to publish Genius of Universal Emancipation. He established his paper specifically to function as an antislavery voice and pushed the cause of Haitian recognition and emigration with it.

Migration to Haiti in the Context of Other Contemporary Migrations

This chapter examines the migration to Haiti in the context of other contemporary migrations. Although organizations and sponsors called the migrants from the U.S. to Haiti “emigrants,” in some senses they were colonists and in other senses exiles. The African American migrants differed from most European colonists in that they were attracted to their destination by its independence from their home nation. But they were not forced to leave; leaving was an act of conscience. To a greater extent than any Europeans since the Puritan “Pilgrims,” they sought refuge from exclusion in the home nation in the actively sympathetic philosophy of the new nation. Even as they retained American customs, the free blacks embraced Haiti's constitution, tacitly rejecting that of the United States. Ultimately, the African American emigrants were political pilgrims, and this is what distinguishes their experience from that of contemporary migrants and colonial adventurers.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter argues that the 1820s was a critical time in the relationship between the United States and Haiti, a time when each exerted influence on the other that had the potential to change their respective histories even more radically. During this decade, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer concentrated on U.S. relations in his work to improve the standing of his nation and opened up the island to African American emigrants as a gambit to strengthen his case for diplomatic recognition from the United States. Boyer's emigration plan found support among a diverse group of Americans, from abolitionists to black-community leaders to hard-nosed businessmen who all saw profit in the enterprise for different reasons. Ultimately, the project had a lasting effect on thousands of emigrants; on the black communities of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York; on Haitian-American relations; and on African American political discourse.

Haiti’s Founding Fathers

This chapter focuses on Haiti's first generation of leaders. Some scholars have characterized these men as originating the economic and political morass into which the country later slid. Leading the first nation in the world to throw off slave shackles and only the second to achieve independence from colonialism, their achievements should be considered in light of the tools available and the hostility of the international community. These leaders were aware that Haiti's independence and nationhood were symbols of racial uplift and proof of racial equality, but they were also aware that world opinion and economic viability were crucial to its fortunes. Thus, these early leaders actively worked to bring African Americans to the island as part of their nation-building efforts.

Introduction

This introductory chapter argues that both Haitian and African American leaders actively promoted Haiti as a quintessentially black nation. Haitian leaders did so by codifying the concept in the nation's constitution and also by other words and deeds. At independence, Haiti identified itself by color, declaring in Article 14 of its constitution, “Haitians henceforth will be known by the generic name of blacks.” All inhabitants, regardless of skin color, would be considered “black,” suggesting an open and inclusive black identity. The constitution also outlawed all white landownership, indicating a color consciousness and a desire to keep whites from the island. Around the same time, members of the African American community began looking to the Caribbean island and embracing color as an identifier. This choice, just as in Haiti, was a strategy to unify against white oppression and racism.

Push and Pull in Haitian Emigration

This chapter examines a range of social pressures that pushed African American individuals to leave everything they knew in America, and a variety of hopes that pulled them to settle in Haiti. The travelers included families, single men, and even single women. They came from all social levels—laundresses and merchants, skilled artisans and unskilled day laborers, farmers and urbanites. Pushed out of an America that refused to treat them as equals, these Americans saw in Haiti a place where the political and economic opportunities that were closed to them in their native country were readily available. They were all drawn to a country that offered a republican government where they could vote without prejudice of color or property and where the skin color that increasingly set them apart as outcasts in the U.S. was privileged. Haiti was in every way presented and understood to be their black “land of the free.”

Boyer’s Recognition Project

This chapter discusses the issues that Jean-Pierre Boyer and his supporters grappled with as they pushed for American acknowledgement of Haiti's independence. Boyer understood that recognizing his state would put the U.S. on the record as accepting a black people as equals—unacceptable for southern politicians. Indeed, to recognize Haiti as a nation would be to recognize at least some people of African descent as equals and would be proclaiming as much to the world. This is precisely why the plantation class in the South objected so strongly. As Boyer made traction toward support for opening up diplomatic ties, Haiti experienced unprecedented negative publicity, including rumors of its involvement in the infamous Vesey Conspiracy Trials in South Carolina and two other slave-revolt scandals in the West Indies.