Haitian emigration

On 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.