Haiti

  Hérard Dumesle and Acaau were both part of a new generation of political activists who found themselves disappointed with the political regimes of postindependence Haiti. As a young man traveling in the north of the country, Dumesle had channeled the spirit of Boukman, and as an opposition politician he attacked Boyer’s authoritarian regime and stood up for free speech and greater democracy. Once in power, however, Dumesle quickly adopted the style of the very regime he had opposed, and he soon followed Boyer into exile in Jamaica. Acaau, meanwhile, represented the promise of an even greater change, giving voice to the huge segment of the Haitian population that lived on the margins of the nation’s political institutions. Ultimately, though, Haiti’s elites did not yield to the demands of the Piquets, which threatened to upend the country’s social order. Over the following decades, political movements in different regions of Haiti would often mobilize peasant groups with promises of land reform, but once in power they delivered little. The stalemate in Haitian society only solidified, with the state remaining largely unaccountable to its citizens. After Guerrier, the government passed through the hands of a rolling series of elites who, despite different regional and social origins, largely resembled one another. As the Haitian secretary of the interior and agriculture noted in an official report soon after the Piquet uprising, the rural population of the country had become a “distinct class,” separated from the urban dwellers by an “almost unbridgeable demarcation.”72

  Acaau, for his part, was never completely co-opted by Guerrier’s government. He tried using his position there to continue the push for broader democracy in Haiti, and in 1846, after those efforts came to naught, he organized another uprising in the south. This second attempted rebellion also ended in failure, and Acaau committed suicide in despair shortly thereafter. His ghost, though, would long haunt Haitian politics. Shortly after his death, Céligny Ardouin, a leading political figure who had helped engineer the presidency of Guerrier, wrote that it was vital to “avoid the appearance of a new Acaau.” A modern historian of French-Haitian relations likewise concludes his work by warning that both foreign and Haitian leaders need to “watch out,” for “a new Acaau can always appear.” The specter of Acaau serves as a constant reminder that one day a truly democratic movement—one that channels the political aspirations of the entire Haitian population—might appear again, and this time succeed.73

  4

  THE SACRIFICE

  In December 1859, an elaborate official funeral was held in the cathedral of Port-au-Prince. The Haitian president, Fabre Geffrard, oversaw the proceedings, while the head Catholic priest of Port-au-Prince officiated a high mass. In the nave of the church was the coffin, draped in black, lit up by candles, and decorated with an inscription naming the deceased as a “martyr for the cause of the blacks.” After a rousing eulogy, it was carried to a cross at the edge of town by a large procession that brought together many of the town’s most prominent citizens. But the coffin was never placed in the ground, for it was empty.1

  The ceremony was held to honor the abolitionist John Brown, who had been executed days earlier in Charles Town, Virginia. Brown had never visited Haiti, but the country’s history had long visited him. He knew the tale of its antislavery revolution by heart and enjoyed recounting it to other abolitionists. According to an English journalist, it was the example of the 1791 uprising that convinced Brown that with the proper trigger, slaves “would immediately rise all over the Southern States.” Brown probably sought to imitate his Haitian forebears’ tactics, too, when he chose the valley town of Harpers Ferry, for he knew that Haitian rebels had won by attacking towns and then retreating into inaccessible mountains to regroup. And as he awaited execution after his plan failed, Brown took solace in reading a biography of Toussaint Louverture.2

  After his father’s hanging, Brown’s son wrote that Louverture’s spirit was speaking to the slaves of the United States. They could hear it, if they listened, “among the pines of the Carolinas in the Dismal Swamp and upon the mountain-tops, proclaiming that the despots of America shall yet know the strength of the toiler’s arm, and that he who would be free must himself strike the first blow.” A Haitian newspaper similarly addressed itself to the slaves of the United States: “Liberty is immortal. Brown and his companions have sown this Slave-land with their glorious blood, and doubt not that therefrom avengers will arise.”3

  It was fitting that Brown’s largest funeral service was held in Haiti, where the president effectively welcomed him posthumously as an honorary Haitian. Perhaps Geffrard also suspected that his country might soon have another reason to be grateful to Brown. For decades, even as American merchants flowed in and out of Haiti, the Haitian governments had consistently been spurned—or simply ignored—when they requested political recognition from the United States. Haitian leaders had seen this rejection as both a chafing insult and a barrier to their country’s full accession to the rights and privileges of an independent nation. But there was no changing the situation—until, that is, the United States descended into civil war. That created an opportunity, and an opening, for the half-century of American refusal to be overturned at last.

  In 1859 there were signs as well that Haiti might soon find a more favorable reception from the only other major power that was still refusing to deal with the island nation: the Vatican. Haitian elites were convinced—and insisted to their country’s skeptical population—that recognition from the Vatican and the United States would prove to everyone that Haiti truly belonged on the global stage. Few of them foresaw the dangers that broader engagement with the world might bring—the insecurity that could result as foreign visitors and governments increasingly criticized the country and intervened in its affairs with ever greater forcefulness. The denial of sovereignty, it turned out, could take many forms.

  * * *

  Haiti and the United States grew up together. The North American colonies, especially New England, depended on and profited from extensive trade with the French colony of Saint-Domingue. John Adams commented in 1783 that the Caribbean was an essential part of the “natural system” of North American commerce: “We are necessary for them, and they necessary for us.” Trade between Saint-Domingue and North America was officially restricted—the French and British empires discouraged trading with competitors and sometime enemies—but that didn’t stop people on either side. Like many other colonies in the Caribbean, Saint-Domingue, with its many small ports and sheltered bays, was in any case basically impossible to police. North American merchants brought lumber and food, especially meat and flour, which were vital in sustaining a colony that was already suffering from deforestation and focused obsessively on the production of sugar and coffee for export rather than food crops for local consumption. And they took home sugar, cotton, and large quantities of molasses, which was transformed into rum in New England.4

  The Haitian Revolution didn’t halt the trading, and even created new opportunities for commerce. The United States was where Toussaint Louverture bought most of his guns and ammunition, which eventually enabled his army to defeat Leclerc. While many in the United States, especially slave owners like Thomas Jefferson, were horrified by the events in Haiti, others were happy to make a profit there. Not even the mass killings of French planters ordered by Dessalines in 1804 dissuaded North American merchants from trading with the newly independent nation; indeed, some seem to have sold him weapons. Dessalines himself apparently exclaimed at one point that only someone who “does not know the whites” might think that the massacres would unfavorably affect trade relations with outsiders. “Hang a white man below one of the pans on the scales of the customs house, and put a sack of coffee in the other pan; the other whites will buy the coffee without paying attention to the body of their fellow white.”5

  In the first year after Haiti’s declaration of independence, no fewer than forty ships sailed between Haiti and the United States. When several merchants held a large banquet in 1805 on board a ship in the New York h
arbor to celebrate a successful trading voyage to Haiti, the guest list included prominent judges, officials, and two generals. The assembled luminaries first drank to the “Commerce of the United States … May its sails be unfurl’d in every sea and as free as the winds which fill them.” For their next toast, they emptied their glasses to “the Government of Hayti; founded on the only legitimate basis of authority … the people’s choice! May it be as durable as its principles are pure.”6

  Although French envoys, smarting from the loss of Saint-Domingue, pressured the U.S. government in 1806 into prohibiting trade with Haiti, the law was repealed in less than three years, and the embargo was never taken very seriously by merchants. By the 1820s, Haiti’s exports to the United States were worth more than two million dollars per year (the equivalent of more than $30 million today), and Haiti was providing one-third of all the coffee consumed in the United States. Haiti brought in a steady stream of imports as well, making it among the top ten U.S. trading partners, just behind Germany and ahead of Brazil. Because Haiti was the only independent country in the Caribbean, with the rest of the region under the control of European empires that restricted trade, it was the one place U.S. merchants could trade freely, and they took full advantage of the opportunity.7

  While the United States was happy to make profits from Haiti, however, the American government consistently refused to recognize it as a political entity. In 1822, Boyer wrote to President Monroe requesting political recognition for Haiti. He reminded him that Haiti had been independent for almost two decades and was in constant communication with the United States. Boyer also invoked the countries’ common history: “The Haitian people do not think that the American people, who in another epoch found themselves in the same situation and felt the same need, can refuse them the justice that is due them.” Monroe, though, saw things differently. The letter, along with a later appeal brought by one of Boyer’s allies in the United States, was stamped “Not to be answered.” Instead, the American government settled on a policy that was, to put it gently, two-faced, leaving Haiti in a curious diplomatic limbo. As the U.S. secretary of the treasury put it, Haiti was considered to be “neither independent nor part of the mother country.” This created some absurd difficulties, similar to the issues that had confronted French envoys trying to arrange meetings with Pétion and Christophe. When, in early 1824, U.S. senators requested that a commercial agent be sent to Haiti carrying a letter of introduction to President Boyer, John Quincy Adams—then serving as secretary of state—explained that there were “difficulties” involved in such an arrangement. A letter addressed to Boyer, the presidential cabinet determined, would be “a mode of recognizing the free government of colored people in Hayti,” and it was not “advisable either to recognize them for the present or at any time in that manner.”8

  The reasons for such refusal were articulated clearly in a magazine article published in 1823. The article admitted that Haiti had a stable government, and indeed could be considered more liberal as a society than many nations in Europe. The problem was that its leaders were black, and the history of how they had come to power offered a potentially inflammatory example. Just a year earlier, the U.S. South had been shaken by the discovery of a conspiracy organized by a slave named Denmark Vesey, who was said to have been inspired by the Haitian Revolution. “The time has not yet come for a surrender of our feelings about color,” the article proclaimed, “nor is it fitting at any time, that the public safety should be endangered.”9

  The refusal to recognize Haiti stood out especially in the context of the wave of revolutions that swept through Latin America during the 1820s, when several countries won their independence. In 1825, in response to this changing geopolitical landscape, President James Monroe famously laid out what came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, casting the United States as a defender of these newly established republics. While Monroe promised that his government would not interfere in “existing colonies or dependencies” of European powers in the Americas, he also promised to oppose any European invasions in nations “who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great, consideration and on just principles acknowledged.” Such invasions, Monroe warned, would be considered “the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.” Haiti, however, was carefully excluded from the principles set out in the Monroe Doctrine. President Monroe, who had refused Boyer’s request for recognition, made clear that the policy of noninterference applied only to independent nations the United States had already acknowledged as independent. Haiti did not qualify.10

  The policy infuriated Haitians, of course. An 1824 editorial in Haiti’s main newspaper lamented that once upon a time, the United States had led the way—it was the nation “from whose example we have learned to conquer our rights.” Now, however, the United States had decided to “tread under foot those principles, which they have made to ring through the world.” “They who act thus,” the writer warned, “do not prove that they have made a good use of their long civilization.”11

  When France finally recognized Haiti in 1825, other European powers, including Prussia and Holland, followed its lead and sent consular agents to the country. It was yet another opportunity for the United States to change course. If Haiti’s defeated colonial masters accept the existence of the country, why not the United States? In 1826, the U.S. Congress debated whether Haiti should be included in the Congress of Panama, which was to bring together a series of newly independent Latin American republics. The answer was, once again, a resounding no.

  Unsurprisingly, Southern representatives were particularly steadfast in their opposition to recognizing Haiti. A representative from Louisiana evoked the terrifying plight of Southern planters trapped between the “black population” of Mexico on one side and Cuba and Haiti on the other. But some northerners were just as virulent. One representative from Massachusetts, Edward Everett—later U.S. secretary of state—declared dramatically, “I would cede the whole continent to anyone who would take it—to England, to France, to Spain: I would see it sunk to the bottom of the Ocean, before I would see any part of this fair America converted into a continental Hayti, by that awful process of bloodshed and desolation by which alone such a catastrophe could be brought on.” Even American independence, Everett suggested, was less important than preserving whites from black rule. Several politicians argued that any connection with Haiti might actually ignite revolt in the United States. “The peace of eleven States in this Union,” a Missouri senator declared, “will not permit black consuls and Ambassadors to establish themselves in our cities, and to parade through the country, and give their fellow blacks in the United States, proof in hand of the honors which await them, for a successful revolt on their part.” “Our policy with regard to Hayti, is plain,” Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina declared. “We can never acknowledge her independence.” As one historian wryly notes, rarely have political leaders “pleaded with so much eloquence for the maintenance of such base principles.”12

  There were, of course, some who challenged these dire visions of Haiti’s influence. Indeed, in 1838 and 1839, when a “gag rule” prevented abolitionists from addressing Congress on the question of slavery, they turned to Haiti as a proxy cause, presenting more than two hundred petitions demanding that the United States recognize the Caribbean nation. For critics of slavery, the achievements of the Haitian Revolution represented a powerful refutation of dominant racist theories about the incapacities of blacks for leadership and self-governance. If Haiti could abolish slavery, might not the rest of the world follow its example, and justice finally prevail? For several prominent writers from the early 1800s onwards, Louverture’s struggle and martyrdom represented a universal striving for freedom.13

  Support for the recognition of Haiti also came from many of the U.S. merchants and naval officers who actually had firsthand experience of the country. One officer, who spent three months there in the early 1830s, wrote
admiringly of President Boyer. He also described how the officers had “no hesitation in dancing and flirting with the St. Domingo ladies, although some of them were as black as the ace of spades,” and mentioned his discovery that the “young women, in grace and lady-like manners, compared most favorably with young women in the best society.” He found the supposed contradiction fascinating, describing one young woman “who was as black as a negress could be, but had the most exquisite figure, small black hands and feet, and beautiful teeth. She had been educated at a convent in Paris, was a very accomplished musician and dancer. Notwithstanding her ebony color, all of us vied with each other in securing her hand for the waltz or the quadrille.” All in all, the officer concluded, they had a wonderful time in Haiti, despite the fact that they were “among niggers.”14

  * * *

  By the mid-nineteenth century, the only major power other than the United States that still did not recognize Haiti was the Vatican. Starting with Toussaint Louverture, Haiti’s leaders had generally practiced Catholicism and had urged their country’s citizens to do the same. But most of the few Catholic priests present in Haiti during the revolution had left the country after its declaration of independence—one of them sneaked out of Port-au-Prince disguised as a sailor—and for the next few decades there was no established Catholic church in the country. Following France’s lead, the Vatican refused to recognize Haiti’s independence during the first decades of the nineteenth century, so the country remained outside the official system of Catholic bishoprics, parishes, and religious brotherhoods. Starting in the 1820s, the Vatican did begin to negotiate with Haitian leaders about once again sending priests to the country. But the negotiations foundered repeatedly because Haitian governments wanted a level of control over the activities of Catholic priests in the country that the Vatican was not willing to grant.15