Haitian emigration
Written By: Michael L. JonesOn June 20, 1859 the schooner A.C. Brewer left New Orleans wharf bound for Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Onboard were 200 free people of color, mostly families, who planned to emigrate to Haiti permanently. They were answering a call from the Haitian government for African Americans to put their skills to work in the service of the first independent, Black nation in the western hemisphere. The young island-nation needed sailors for its ships, field workers for the abandoned sugar and coffee plantations left by French planters after the revolution, and other forms of nation building.
There is no official record of how many African American accepted the invitation to Haiti. The regular depart of ships carrying African Americans there was enough to draw interest of local newspapers all over the country. On June 23, three days after the departure of the A.C. Brewer, the Times-Picayune ran an article titled “Free Black Emigration.” The writer surmised that, “The importance of this movement and its probable influence on the welfare of the Haytien people, as well as the fate of the black race in general, and especially on that of the free black population, which occupies a sort of uncertain and undefined position in our midst, is well worthy of reflection and study.”
There were a variety of cultural and political forces that motivated free people of color to emigrate to Haiti in the late antebellum period and the beginning of the American Civil War. Haiti and the Haitian Revolution has always had an important place in Black nationalist thought. As a product of the only successful slave uprising in the Americas, the nation’s very existence is a testament to Black agency that ripples through social justice organizations to this day. African American emigrants were motivated by Haiti’s potential to show the capabilities of the Black race.
Following the Haitian Revolution (1791 to 1804) and a number of slave insurrections, southern leaders were increasingly suspicious of the activities of free people of color. Beginning in the 1830, southern lawmakers began to pass legislation designed to limit their mobility and to police their conduct. The wave of new discriminatory laws started in Virginia but soon spread throughout the south. Fearing free people of color might be organizing slave insurrections, a law was passed in Louisiana in 1825 that required free Blacks to leave state in 60 days and only those issued a special license would be allowed to return. That law was later amended to bar travel to Haiti, where French forces were defeated by a coalition of mulattos, who enjoyed a higher social status than Blacks, and enslaved people.
Haitian refugees doubled the size of New Orleans after the revolution and the number of free people of color in the city. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Afro-Creoles found themselves cast from the Francophobe world with degrees of Black and white into the United States where one had to be one or another. Afro-Creole historian Rodolphe Desdunes said, “Free people of color were suspected of sympathy for slaves, although there were no outward symptoms to indicate the existence of this sentiment. It was therefore believed that they should be reduced to impotence, either by intimidation or by exile.”
Jean-Jacques Dessalines was a hero of the Haitian Revolution who became the nation’s Governor-General for Life once it had achieved independence from France. But there was still lingering tension between the mulattos and their formerly enslaved countrymen. The mulattoes saw themselves as the best equipped to rule the new nation, but the former slaves wanted nothing to do with the racial hierarchy that kept them at the bottom. Dessalines’ solution was to expand the definition of Blackness was to include not just dark-skinned people but also mulattos and anyone else with African genes. His proclamations were also aimed at skilled African Americans who he believed were the key to rebuilding his nation’s economy.
In 1804, Dessalines announced his “Liberty or Death” proclamations in which he blamed Europeans for dividing the children of Africa. Dessalines declared, “Blacks and Yellows, whom the refined duplicity of Europeans has for a long time endeavoured to divide; you, who are now consolidated, and make but one family; without doubt it was necessary that our perfect reconciliation should be sealed with the blood of your butchers.”
Dessalines’ speech could be viewed as a forerunner of Pan African ideology. He emphasized that the members of the African diaspora have a common victimizer and common goals. His proclamation and the attacks on the liberty of free people of color in the United States ignited for the first wave of Haitian emigration in America and influenced black nationalist thinkers in the United States. In the “The Roots of Early Black Nationalism: Northern African Americans’ Invocations of Haiti in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Sara C. Fanning suggested that “Haiti, in many ways, was the black nation underpinning early American ideas of black nationalism. For African Americans, Haiti was a model of black military power, a defender of racial rights, and a land that opened its arms to them.”
During the 1820s, more than 10,000 free people of color moved to Haiti from the northeastern United States. According to Fanning, “American sailors were on the front lines of the recruiting efforts, which started in newspapers throughout the northern United States. Dessalines publicly offered American ship captains forty dollars for every African American they brought to Haiti.”
Unfortunately for Dessaline, his ideas on Black unity did not go over as nearly as well in Haiti in the United States. He was killed as his country descended into its own Civil War. Haiti split along a Black and yellow color line. Dessaline’s successor was a dark-skinned man named Henry Christophe and the opposition was led by a mulatto named Alexandre Petion. Both men continued Dessaline’s efforts to attract African Americans, especially sailors, to their respective sides of the country. Interest in Haitian emigration in the United States died down in the 1830, but was revived in the worsening racial tensions of the 1850 and the American Civil War.
The first National Emigration Convention of Colored People took place in Cleveland in 1854. Organized by pioneering activist Martin Delaney, the convention was a response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required escaped slaves to be turned over their owners even in free states. The purpose of the convention was to decide whether African Americans were better off in the United States or to emigrate elsewhere.
One notable figure who attended the convention was Rev. James Theodore Holly, who led 110 emigrants to Haiti in 1861. Holly, born in 1829, was a native of Washington, D.C. His mother was a freed Catholic slave and she raised him in that faith. But Holly left the Catholic Church because of its lack of Black clergy. After moving to Brooklyn, he got involved with abolitionist causes. He lived in Canada for a while and helped former Kentucky slave Henry Bibb publish a newspaper.
Holly eventually gave up on the idea that people of color ever could ever really be free in the United States. He began to investigate Haiti. After being ordained in the Episcopal Church in the 1850s, he visited the island-nation on behalf of the church. The experience convinced him even more of the rightness of emigration.
In his treatise Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self-Governance and Civilized Progress, Holly said of Haiti, “Her rich resources invite the capacity of 10,000,000 human beings to adequately use them. It becomes then an important question for the negro race in America to well consider the weighty responsibility that the present exigency devolves upon them, to contribute to the continued advancement of this negro nationality of the New World until its glory and renown shall overspread and cover the whole earth, and redeem and regenerate by its influence in the future, the benighted Fatherland of the race in Africa.”
Emile Desdunes was born into a prominent Afro-Creole family of Haitian-descendant in New Orleans. The Desdunes family developed a reputation for cultural achievement and social activism. In addition to Emile, the family included historian Rodolphe Desdunes, who co-founded Comité des Citoyens to the Plessy v Ferguson decision, and his brother poet and author Pierre-Aristide Desdunes. Rodolphe Desdunes’ son Daniel F. Desdunes was a ragtime bandleader and composer in Omaha, and Rodolphe’s illegitimate daughter Mamie Desdunes is was also a musician and composer in New Orleans. She was a former neighbor of jazz legend Jelly Roll Morton. He learned the song “Mamie’s Blues” from her and introduced it to Alan Lomax during their famous interview at the Library of Congress.
Emile Desdunes emigrated to Haiti to avoid the rising racism in the United States. Haiti was then ruled by Faustin I Soulouque, who crowned himself Emperor of Haiti in 1849. Like Dessaline, Soulouque wanted to attract skilled free people of color to Haiti so he could get the sugar economy restarted. He commissioned Desdunes to return to the United States and act as his recruiting agent. News that Haiti was offering of asylum and free passage to free people of color appeared in newspapers all over the United States. It was of special interest to New Orleans newspapers, because of the city’s close ties to the island.
On January 20, 1859, Desdunes was interviewed by the Time-Picayune about the political situation in Haiti. The paper described him as “a citizen of Port-au-Prince … here for the second time on a mission from the Emperor Soulouque’s Government, to induce agriculturalists and mechanics of our free colored population to emigrate to Hayti, under very flattering promises of protection and assistance from the Haytien Government, whose desire it is to place under active and extensive cultivation a large quantity of partially abandoned sugar and other estates.”
Haiti was inviting African American emigration at the same time the American Colonization Society was trying to convince free people of color to relocate to Africa. The ACS was started in 1817 as a potential alternative to emancipation. The project attracted white politicians like Henry Clay who didn’t believe free Blacks would ever be accepted in America and also some African Americans who wanted to return to the motherland. Delaney himself visited Liberia in 1859.
Haitian emigration spooked white leaders in a way that African emigration being pushed by the American Colonization Society did not. It was one thing to allow people of color to establish an independent nation in the ancestral homeland of their race, but it was a different matter to allow them to create a potential regional rival in land once dominated by white men.
In 1850, Frederick Douglass’s North Star newspaper reported on 164 slaves who were being freed upon the death of their owner and sent to Liberia, the African American settlement in West Africa. The slaves were freed by a Major Wood, who “appropriated by will $5000 to defray the expenses of their emigration. It was his desire, and was so expressed in his will, that they should be sent to Hayti (sic), but his executors, D. Charles West, of Houston Co., and Judge Elias Reed, of this city, after employing an agent to go to Hayti to examine and report the condition of things there, thought it impolitic to send them there, and obtained order of Court to change their destination to Africa, believing that this course would better promote and secure the happiness of the negroes themselves, and carry out the benevolent designs of their former owner.”
One wonders if the paternalistic treatment of Woods’ former slaves was based on actual concern about the situation in Haiti or the executor’s personal dislike of sending the free Blacks there. It is true that many of the African Americans who emigrated to Haiti were not prepared for the reality of life there. The majority of people Desdunes and Holly attracted to Haiti eventually returned home. They were not prepared for tropical diseases like yellow fever, inadequate housing, and political upheaval that characterized the island-nation’s politics. But neither Desdunes or Holly lost his faith in the potential of Haiti.
Frederick Douglass was one of the most high-profile African American opponents of emigration. In fact, there was a small controversy after Douglass’ newspaper erroneously stated that the emigration convention was only for United States citizens and not Canadians. This bothered some delegates because of the number of escaped slaves living as freedmen in Canada. Fortunately, the confusion was cleared up but some people saw it as an attempt to hamper the success of the convention.
African American critics of emigration opposed the idea that free people should have to emigrate, be it to Mexico, Haiti, Liberia, Canada or anywhere. Rather than starting over in a new locale, they argued that African Americans should stay in the United States and fight for their equal rights. The Christian Recorder ran two letters on Haitian emigration from T. Strothers of Terre Haute, Indiana in consecutive issues in 1859. Strothers portrayed Haiti’s offer of asylum for free Blacks as a Ponzi scheme. He reasoned that the whole island had in total 29,000 square miles and part of that was the Spanish controlled Dominican Republic. Strother estimated that with a population around 900,000, Haiti already had 45 inhabitants to every square mile. He wondered how much land was really available land for African Americans to take over or if the plan was for emigrants to simply work on the nation’s plantations as sharecroppers. Strothers thought the Haitian government might even be worse than the people behind the ACS.
Strothers declared, “this Haytien emigration scheme, in my opinion, is very nearly as corrupt as any scheme could be. At least, Mr. Editor, I will show you what I conceive to be the difference. The sole object of the Colonization scheme, primitively, was to rid this country of free persons of color as fast as they become liberated from bondage, so that they may not be in the way of slaves, nor white race. The Haytien scheme has for its sole object the making of money - so you see, while prejudice, with a few other things, underlie the one, money-making underlies the motives for the other.
In many ways, the issues that surround African American emigration in the antebellum period foreshadows some of the debates about black nationalist debates of the 20th century. Delaney was the intellectual forefather of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which wanted to transport members of the diaspora back to their ancestral home in Africa. The same themes that drove people to Haiti and Liberia can be found in Kwame Nkrumah’s request for people of color to return to Ghana to help build the first independent African nation. However, neither movement turned out the way emigrants expected.
