Haiti

  The lack of formal Vatican approval did not stop the Haitian population from practicing Catholicism, so Haiti still needed priests, whether Rome wanted to send them or not. And there were always a few who were ready to answer the call. Considered renegades by the papacy, they were a small, remarkably international group. Some came from Latin America, others from Corsica and France; the head priest of Port-au-Prince, who would officiate at John Brown’s ceremonial funeral, hailed from Senegal. Their motives for coming to Haiti were as varied as their origins. Some French priests traveling to the country were inspired by the legendary French abolitionist the Abbé Grégoire, who had corresponded with Toussaint Louverture during the 1790s about setting up a Haitian church and had publicly supported the country’s independence. Others, having been defrocked or run into conflicts with their superiors, found Haiti a welcome refuge.16

  The Catholic Church derided the “renegade” priests as debauched opportunists who got rich selling sacraments to gullible Haitians, and the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher—shocked during his 1841 visit to find many of them living openly with women—wrote that it was “impossible to imagine anything more perverse than the Haitian clergy.” But Haitian communities clearly appreciated their services, and despite their unofficial status, the priests in Haiti oversaw active and well-attended churches. In 1842, when Bishop Joseph Rosati of St. Louis, Missouri, traveled to Port-au-Prince, he was “extremely pleased” by what he found. “The Church is spacious, very decent, the grand altar is of marble, the sacred vestments & vessels are rich and clean,” he reported; it was “quite full of people” for two masses on Sunday as well as on feast days. Rosati noted that the service was performed “with as much decency & solemnity as in the Cathedrals of Europe” by a parish priest, two assistants, and a dozen choirboys “dressed in surplices and red cassocks” along with a “number of other singers.” They walked into church led by a Swiss guard in full uniform and carrying a halberd. To top it all off, Rosati effused, “the Gregorian chant is well performed, the singers knowing very well the note.” Indeed, one could be forgiven for wondering whether Haitian Catholics needed papal approval at all.17

  Haitian president Boyer, however, considered the lack of official recognition by the papacy to be an insult and a barrier to the country’s full acceptance by the international community. He also believed that the Catholic Church would be a valuable ally in his project to improve the Haitian population. He and the Vatican tried hard to come to an agreement that would balance the demands of both parties: the papacy sent five missions to Haiti between 1821 and 1842, and the bishop of Charleston, South Carolina, spent a full five years in Haiti. But just when the deal was almost ready, Boyer was overthrown in the revolution of 1843. Almost two decades would pass before the Vatican would hold talks with Haiti again.18

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  As Haiti struggled to gain recognition and respect from major foreign powers in the mid-nineteenth century, its difficulties were increased by the sharply negative opinions that most outsiders held regarding Faustin Soulouque, who ruled the country from 1847 to 1859—holding power longer than any nineteenth-century Haitian head of state other than Boyer. At a time when the country’s leaders were often criticized by foreign observers, Soulouque was particularly vilified, dismissed as a buffoon and made the target of scathing parody. The verdict from most modern scholars has also been harsh; one recent study of Haiti summed up Soulouque’s reign as “twelve years of tyranny” and “the greatest disaster the country experienced in the nineteenth century.” Against such judgments, however, a few historians have offered a different reading, portraying Soulouque—in the words of one recent defender—as “a man of high intelligence, a realist, a pragmatist, and a superb if ruthless politician and diplomat.”19

  Soulouque’s regime is especially remarkable because it was produced entirely by accident, the result of a seemingly clever maneuver by Haiti’s political elites that turned out to be a severe miscalculation. In their plan, Soulouque was never supposed to be anything more than a puppet. The elderly veteran Philippe Guerrier, who had been installed as president in 1844 in part to placate Acaau’s supporters, died after only eleven months in office, and two successors to Guerrier also held the presidency for less than a year apiece. In February 1847, the Haitian senators thus found themselves searching once more for a presidential replacement while facing ongoing peasant uprisings in the south of the country. Hoping to apply once more the politique de doublure that had worked with Guerrier, they turned to Soulouque, whom they saw as both a useful symbol and an easy-to-manipulate figurehead. The head of the presidential guard in Port-au-Prince, Soulouque was a sixty-year-old military officer nearing the end of a long career. He was also a black ex-slave, in contrast to most of the members of the Senate, who were light-skinned and often the descendants of free people of color. According to a possibly apocryphal story, Soulouque was so surprised when told of his new position that at first he took the whole thing for a practical joke. But it was Soulouque who ultimately played the real joke on those who had chosen him.20

  Once in power, Soulouque proved both ambitious and politically savvy. He rapidly got rid of the senators who had elevated him to the presidency, and a few months later ordered the killings of a group of prominent men—part of the traditional political elite—whom he suspected of conspiring against him. He then set about creating a new governing class, replacing the landowners and professionals who had traditionally dominated politics with supporters drawn from the middle ranks of the military. After crowning himself emperor of Haiti in August 1849, Soulouque followed Christophe’s model and institutionalized this new elite as a hereditary aristocracy. The times, of course, were now different, and Soulouque’s court, even more than Christophe’s, was derided by many Europeans as an absurdity. But, as under Christophe’s reign, the nobility was essentially Soulouque’s way of constructing a governing coalition, binding together military officers and intellectuals, blacks and mulattoes, in support of his rule.21

  Soulouque’s regime became a famous subject of satire in France, partly because making fun of the Haitian emperor was a way for the French to make fun of their own ruler, Louis Napoleon. Napoleon was no particular friend of Haiti, which he once called a “land of barbarians.” But after he crowned himself Napoleon III in 1851, putting an end to three years of democratic renewal, his furious critics accused him of imitating the Haitian leader. Karl Marx, in his legendary account of Napoleon’s rise to power, lampooned the court of Napoleon III as “a noisy, disreputable, rapacious bohème” that had the “same grotesque dignity as the high dignitaries of Soulouque.” The comparison deeply bothered the French ruler. When satirists in Paris described the creation of Versailles as soulouquerie, turning the Haitian emperor’s fabled excesses into a derogatory tag, Napoleon issued an edict specifically prohibiting the use of that word.22

  But if Soulouque was usually dismissed by external critics as stupid and inept, it was also in part precisely because he proved rather stubborn in the face of outside pressures, granting few concessions to foreign governments. He was particularly wary of the United States, being deeply concerned about the growing American power in the region. Part of the problem was that during the 1840s and 1850s—especially during the “forty-niner” California gold rush—Central America became one of the major routes for North American travelers going from the East Coast to the West. Instead of crossing the North American continent, it was often easier and less expensive for travelers to get to California by heading south, traveling by boat through the Caribbean, overland across the Panama isthmus to the Pacific, and by boat again to their destination. Only in the 1860s would the construction of transcontinental railways largely put an end to this travel pattern, and by then the U.S. commercial and political involvement in the Caribbean and Central America was firmly established.23

  Soulouque was also aware that some Southern planters had an ambitious plan for the Caribbean: they dreamed of taking over Cuba and making it int
o another slaveholding state of the United States. In addition, a few looked to the Dominican Republic as a place for American companies to set up plantations for growing sugar and fruit. Indeed, the entire region was seen by many, according to one historian, as “an undeveloped paradise—a veritable Garden of Eden—anxiously awaiting the enterprise and appreciation that only Americans could bestow.” Annexationists saw the population of the Caribbean as being in desperate need of help and discipline from the north. “With swelling hearts and suppressed impatience they await our coming, and with joyous shouts of ‘Welcome! Welcome!’ will they receive us,” one journalist wrote about the Cubans. Another proclaimed that in the Caribbean and other regions to the south, “decaying nations and races invite our coming.”24

  Though annexationists mostly focused on Cuba, which had a thriving plantation system, Soulouque’s regime in Haiti was singled out by some as a particularly backward place that called out for external control. Several U.S. citizens had claims against Haiti dating back to the period of Christophe—the king, they said, had defrauded them of money—and in 1850, the United States sent three warships to Port-au-Prince in their support. It was a surprising gesture, for the cost of the expedition almost certainly outstripped the amount of money at stake. But sending warships became an increasingly common maneuver for both the United States and European nations, a way for their governments to make it clear that they were ready to use force against Haiti when they deemed it necessary to protect their citizens and their substantial business interests in the country.25

  Soulouque’s government declared it knew nothing about the Christophe matter, and negotiations over the payment of the claims dragged on for years. While the claims were relatively small, the fact that they were not paid promptly incited a set of violent and racist denunciations of Haiti—and particularly of Soulouque—in the American press. “Several outrages on the persons and property of American citizens have been committed by the authorities of the so-called nigger Billy Bowlegs, Faustin Emperor the First, for which redress should be demanded,” fulminated the New York Herald in April 1850. If the Haitians didn’t respond, the article went on, then “the big black nigger, the Emperor himself” and his “equally black constables or officers, should be severely punished.” Clearly, the Herald writer concluded, the “nigger population of Haiti” had “very hostile feelings towards the United States” and should be “licked into good behavior.” The metaphors were as brutal as they were clear: Haiti was a slave, the United States the master. Another newspaper piece, published the next day, went a step further, arguing that if Haitians continued to be recalcitrant, then all of them should literally be reenslaved. There were, this article declared, ten thousand men who would “volunteer to colonize St. Domingo the instant the administration gives a hint that it is desirable.” They were ready, on a moment’s notice, to “abolish the negro butchery business”: “St. Domingo will be a State in a year, if our cabinet will but authorize white volunteers to make slaves of every negro they can catch when they reach Hayti.”26

  Such talk, of course, was bound to set an ex-slave like Soulouque on edge. In 1855, partly because of his fears that the United States might gain control over the Dominican Republic and attack Haiti from there, he decided to invade the eastern half of Hispaniola. It was not a new idea: Dessalines had also tried to occupy Haiti’s eastern neighbor, and Boyer had succeeded in placing the entire island under his government for more than two decades. The 1855 invasion, however, was poorly planned and poorly led. Within a few weeks, the Haitian troops were routed and in retreat.*27

  Soulouque’s power within Haiti, built in large part on his control over the army, was dealt a severe blow by the failed Dominican campaign. As a result, he found himself without much popular support a few years later when the United States decided to take over a small piece of Haitian territory: Navassa, a tiny island lying between Jamaica and the Haitian mainland. About eight square miles in size, uninhabited, and pockmarked with caves and rocky outcroppings, Navassa was a particularly inviting place for seabirds, and over centuries the island had become a massive repository of bird excrement mixed with bird corpses. At the time, U.S. farmers concerned about the decreasing yields of their land had begun turning to the use of fertilizers, and bird excrement—guano—was one of the best and most prized of these. It was sold by various countries, notably Peru, but U.S. businessmen were eager to get their hands on a cheaper source of the material.28

  In 1856, the U.S. Congress passed the “Guano Islands” act, which authorized the government to take possession of islands that could supply the valuable product. (In time, the United States would claim seventy such islands.) The act also stipulated that U.S. citizens could take over guano-rich islands only if no other country either occupied or claimed them, which seemed to render Navassa beyond its reach: while no Haitians had ever settled on Navassa, it had always been considered part of the Haitian territory, and indeed was explicitly mentioned as such in several of the country’s constitutions. Haiti based its claim on long precedent: the island’s history as part of Saint-Domingue went back to the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, in 1857 a U.S. ship captain landed at Navassa, and on the basis of the “Guano Act” claimed it as territory of the United States.29

  Soulouque protested that any exploitation of the guano on the island had to be carried out under a license from his government, and at first the American settlers accepted the conditions, allowing the Haitian flag to be raised on the island. Soon, however, the United States sent navy forces to Navassa, and an admiral sailed a warship into the harbor of Port-au-Prince to intimidate the Haitians into backing down. The show of strength succeeded. Within a few years the United States had built a small colony on Navassa, using African American and Haitian laborers to collect guano and ship it north. Despite complaints by Haitian diplomats, who documented their country’s claim to the island and pointed out that its acquisition contravened the terms of the “Guano Act,” the U.S. government refused to cede possession.30

  Conditions on Navassa were harsh, and in 1889, workers revolted and killed five people. Lawyers defending the workers argued that U.S. courts couldn’t condemn them because the incident had not taken place on American soil. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which eventually ruled that U.S. law did cover Navassa. A few decades later, in 1916, the U.S. government officially annexed the island as a territory, which it remains to this day—a little-known outpost in the Caribbean that now attracts only birds and ornithologists. For Haiti, its loss represented both a lost opportunity for the country to develop a new and profitable export and a threatening demonstration of ever-expanding U.S. control of the region.31

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  Even as the United States began to shadow Haiti in the late 1850s, however, the country’s insurgent history took a kind of revenge on its northern neighbor. As tensions between the northern and southern states intensified, the example of Haiti’s revolution proved to be a constant presence, exacerbating the conflict that ultimately led to civil war. The orator Wendell Phillips, for example, drew huge crowds to speeches he gave celebrating Toussaint Louverture. Many orators and writers had compared Louverture to Washington and Napoleon over the previous decades, but Phillips went further, arguing that Louverture was actually a greater figure than either of these. “I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and a sea of blood,” he declared. “I would call him Washington, but the great general had slaves.” If such high praise seemed surprising, Phillips told the crowd, it was only because “you read history not with your eyes, but with your prejudices.” In fifty years, he assured them, when the muse of history wrote the list of the greatest men of all time, she would dip “her pen in the sunlight” and “write in clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE.”32

  Antiabolitionist forces, meanwhile, saw Haiti as the embodiment of an existential threat. One response to Wendell Phillips, for insta
nce, complained that he “blasphemes the name of Washington” by placing “above him on the roll of fame, a midnight assassin and robber, a carrier of the brand into peaceful homes at night, a butcherer of babes and violator of women.” For such critics, the Haitian Revolution was circumscribed by the obsessively repeated phrase “the horrors of Santo Domingo,” meant to immediately trigger visions of black insurgents killing babies and raping white women over the bodies of their dead husbands. A popular history book described the Haitian Revolution as a time when “virgins were immolated on the altar; weeping infants hurled into fires.” In the aftermath of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, a college professor explained that if the South didn’t secede from the Union, they would be “St. Domingois’d.”33

  Drawing on narratives of the Haitian Revolution that claimed the slave uprising had been incited by French radicals, Southern secessionists drew an analogy to their own situation. Southern planters were like the whites of Saint-Domingue, they argued, surrounded by slaves who were docile under normal circumstances but could turn to violent revolt when prodded into action by outside agitators. The lesson of the Haitian Revolution was therefore clear: if they wanted to survive, U.S. slave owners had to escape from Northern abolitionists before these meddlers managed to start a slave revolution in the South.34

  The Southern secessionists, though, also seem to have curiously under-studied the event they so often referred to. Keen to evoke the way in which outside agitators had supposedly stirred up the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, they forgot what happened next: by reaching out to the English in an attempt to preserve their slaveholding privilege, French planters had turned themselves into traitors against their own country. Meanwhile, the slave insurgents, by standing with the French Republic, came to take on the role of saviors and patriots. Some parts of that history repeated themselves during the Civil War, as Southern slaveholders chose secession and African American leaders and soldiers effectively used military service in defense of the Union as a platform from which to attack slavery and demand full citizenship in the United States.