Haiti

  More immediately, the secession of the southern states also finally opened the way for U.S. recognition of Haiti. In December 1861, President Lincoln declared that he saw no “good reason” why the United States should “persevere longer in withholding our recognition of the independence and sovereignty” of its Caribbean neighbor. While some in Congress still opposed recognition—arguing, for instance, that Washington society was not yet ready to receive a black minister representing Haiti and allow him to sit in the Senate gallery as a diplomat—Lincoln had a powerful ally in Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, an impassioned abolitionist and clever politician. Sumner judiciously argued the case for recognition by highlighting its strategic usefulness, insisting that the United States needed to “provide a check to distant schemes of ambition” of European empires seeking to expand their control in the Caribbean. He pointed to a series of alarming developments in the region, particularly the return of the Dominican Republic to Spanish rule in March 1861—a clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine. The American government, facing a more serious problem at home in 1861, was in no position to take action against Spain. But, Sumner argued, by recognizing Haiti, the United States could counterbalance the influence of the European empire on the island.35

  Trade considerations also entered into the discussion. In a letter that was read in Congress as part of the debate over recognition, a U.S. commercial agent in Haiti complained that the refusal of diplomatic relations was “altogether disastrous of our commerce, & almost destroys the political influence of our government & its commercial agents.” A “prompt & cordial recognition of Haytian nationality,” he claimed, would “diffuse among those whole people a satisfaction which can hardly be understood in America.” By making the gesture of recognition, “followed up on our part by even only the ordinary civilities of official intercourse,” the United States would be able to “hold this island in the hollow of our hand.” There was, the agent insisted, “no nation whose friendship, good opinion & protection the Haytian people so strongly desire & seek as those of the United States.”36

  After some deliberation, both the Senate and House passed the measure. On June 5, 1862—nearly six decades after Haitian independence, and almost four decades after France had officially recognized the independence of its former colony—the United States at last officially accepted the nation’s existence. In early 1863, the first Haitian diplomat arrived in Washington, though the legation soon moved to New York, to the appropriately named Liberty Street. The U.S. government, meanwhile, gained much in return, for Haiti allowed Union warships to use its ports, which became important bases in the battle against the Confederacy. A U.S. coaling station was set up in Le Cap, and U.S. sailors and officers frequented the town and dined with local officials. One of them even found time for a bit of tourism, making the trip up to Christophe’s Citadel.37

  * * *

  By the time of U.S. recognition, Haiti was no longer ruled by Emperor Soulouque and his court. Fabre Geffrard, one of Soulouque’s generals, had overthrown him in 1859 and reestablished Haiti as a republic. Geffrard reversed many of the policies of the previous regime, decreasing the size of the army, which had expanded under Soulouque, and returning power to the traditional elite of the country, the wealthier and often light-skinned landowners and professionals. Like Boyer in the 1820s, Geffrard also enthusiastically worked to bring African Americans to Haiti, advancing them money to cover travel costs and offering them credit to buy land. An organization called the Haitian Bureau, funded by Geffrard’s government with $20,000 (the equivalent of about $500,000 today), set up offices in several U.S. cities, including New York and New Orleans, and brought more than two thousand American emigrants to the country in the early 1860s.38

  A key figure in the Haitian Bureau was Joseph Theodore Holly, a deacon in the Episcopal Church who had spent most of a decade ardently promoting Haiti as a homeland for African Americans. It was a place, he argued, where they could truly be at ease under a black government instead of perpetually on the run from the threats of slavery and white supremacy. Haiti was “the first nationality established by our race,” Holly proclaimed, and “every colored man should feel bound to sustain the national existence of Hayti.” In his speeches and writings, Holly celebrated the achievements of the Haitian Revolution. Joined by several collaborators, including John Brown’s son, he traveled around New England recruiting settlers to join him in moving to Haiti. They would embark on what he called a new “Mayflower expedition” gathering “sable pioneers in the cause of civil and religious liberty.” He was choosy about who could go, seeking “unobtrusive, industrious, peaceable, intelligent, moral, progressive and useful citizens.” (They must, he specified, “not be like the Irish.”) In May 1861, Holly and a hundred of his followers sailed from New Haven, seen off by a large crowd. Though the journey was not without its difficulties, on their arrival in Port-au-Prince, several of the pilgrims were elated. “As I walked the streets of the capital I felt as no colored man in the United States can feel,” one wrote, enjoying the sight of politicians, judges, and generals who all shared his color. “I am a man in Hayti where I feel as I never felt before, entirely free,” another reported.39

  Geffrard offered the newcomers a home on an estate he owned near Port-au-Prince, but the conditions were difficult. Many of the settlers died from disease, including Holly’s mother, his wife, and two of his young children. Still, Holly remained loyal to Haiti, as did many of those who had traveled with him. He soon married again, taking as his wife another member of the settler community, and he ended up raising ten children who became Haitian citizens. Several of them trained as doctors and engineers in the United States and other countries before coming back to work as professionals in Holly’s adopted homeland.40

  Holly devoted himself in particular to work as a missionary for the Episcopal Church, convinced that Haiti offered a “splendid opportunity” for conversion. Although he received much less help from Episcopal churches in the U.S. organization than he had hoped or expected, his efforts eventually led to the creation of a permanent Episcopal presence on the island. In 1874 he was named the first Episcopal bishop in Haiti, establishing the Orthodox Apostolic Church—the country’s first national church, and also the first church founded under Anglican auspices outside English-speaking countries. Invited to England in 1878, he became the first black man to preach at Westminster Abbey. Although his church started out relatively small, with only two thousand members by the time of Holly’s death in 1911, it has remained a central institution in the country, and today boasts ninety thousand members.41

  Holly was not the only one seeking souls in nineteenth-century Haiti: his coming coincided with the arrival of a stream of Catholic priests from France. Geffrard, who like many other members of the elite sent his children to be educated in Catholic schools in France, had made it a priority to bring the Catholic Church back to Haiti, and after taking power he dispatched two envoys to Rome. In 1860, just as Haiti was on the verge of winning recognition from the United States, a concordat largely based on the model proposed by Boyer in 1842 was finally signed between Haiti and the papacy. More than half a century after its declaration of independence, Haiti was at last formally recognized by the Catholic Church.42

  A new era of Catholic activism now began. Despite Haiti’s long history as a country of practicing Catholics, the priests who arrived after 1860 saw themselves as missionaries. Unlike their predecessors, who tended to concentrate in the larger towns, they fanned out to the many parts of the country that had no churches. A priest working in the isolated village of Jean-Rabel reported in 1871 that the church there was little more than a “hangar,” and he began taking up a collection from the local community to build a new one. He ended up with a group of Catholic volunteers, who first gathered stones from the ruins of an old government building, then tramped to a nearby plantation and brought back stones from the owner’s collapsed house. With the new church built, the priest of Jean-Rabel organized a
nighttime procession for the feast day of Saint Joseph, with a statue of the Virgin Mary carried through the streets. The priest effused that the event was as beautiful as any he had seen in France, and he noted that it convinced several young people to become regular churchgoers. Still, the process of implantation was a slow one, and not every place was as devoted to church building as the village of Jean-Rabel. In 1886 the church at Furcy, a community of thriving small farms in the high mountains above Port-au-Prince, was a wooden shack with a small bell mounted beside it.43

  The new generation of priests considered it one of their major missions to moralize Haitians. A report from 1861 complained that not only young children but even those as old as ten or twelve walked around naked in the streets of the towns, while adults “dare announce their lack of modesty by bathing in a state of complete nudity” in public places, even along the stream that crossed the Champ de Mars in the center of Port-au-Prince. An even more serious problem, in their eyes, was the near-total absence of marriage in the society, or at least of marriage as Catholic priests understood it. A priest in Jacmel reported in 1868 that of the nearly twelve hundred children he had baptized, only nineteen were born of parents who had been married in the church, and priests elsewhere found a similar situation. In fact, though, most of these children were born of unions that had been formalized by the community, frequently through a practice known as plaçage. A man wishing to live with a woman wrote a letter to her and her parents requesting permission to establish a permanent union. If they accepted, a ceremony took place at the woman’s house. Plaçage allowed a man to form multiple unions in parallel, but it also required from him fidelity to his wife or wives. And, within the broader institution of the lakou system, it was understood that each wife and her children were to have access to their own plot of land. Most priests, however, saw these practices as backward and barbaric, marks of vice. As one despairingly wrote in 1867, in the area of Môle Saint-Nicolas all he could see was “bigamy, trigamy, all the way to septigamy.” The situation was partly understandable, the priests concluded, since it was the result of the absence of the Catholic church for several generations, but that only made their task—what one priest called the “rehabilitation of Christian marriage”—all the more central. In the end, the church managed to effect only a partial change in social practices, with plaçage continuing as a common mechanism for forming unions in Haiti to the present day.44

  Another major mission of the Catholic priesthood in Haiti involved helping Geffrard to expand access to education, especially in rural areas. Geffrard’s education minister wrote that the Catholic Church could be a valuable ally in pursuing the work of “civilizing” Haiti, and the Catholic bishops were made part of the government commissions overseeing national education. By 1885 there were nine new schools staffed by Catholic priests and funded by the Haitian state, which provided the buildings, paid the teachers’ salaries, and offered scholarships to the students. More were opened in the following years.45

  One of the most important of these schools, the Petit Séminaire Collège Saint-Martial, was originally set up as a seminary but soon became a college providing secondary education for several hundred pupils. The school had a swimming pool, a natural history collection, and a magnificent library boasting books from as far back as the sixteenth century. In 1873, its students became famous and beloved in Port-au-Prince when some of them, led by a German-born priest, formed the city’s first fire company. A couple of years later the company obtained a steam pump, which allowed them to rush to the scene of a fire and send a strong stream of water into the flames. “Progress is penetrating into us through every pore,” wrote a journalist who witnessed the students using the pump to put out a fire, applauded by a cheering crowd. “The hammer of civilization is destroying, stone by stone, the Great Wall of China that was built around our island.”46

  * * *

  Haiti’s growing recognition by and engagement with the outside world carried a significant cost, however. As the nineteenth century went on, Haiti’s leaders became increasingly concerned with the views that European countries and the United States had of their nation. Some decided that it was crucial to embark on a kind of internal civilizing mission, purifying the country of the “primitive” influences that they, like many outsiders, saw as an obstacle to Haiti’s progress. President Geffrard, for instance, decided early in his administration to strike at what he and other political elites considered a scourge: the Vodou religion. Foreign observers criticizing Soulouque’s reign had taken particular glee in portraying the emperor as a man in the thrall of Vodou and cannibalism, and Geffrard was determined to change the international image of the country. “Let us rush to eliminate the last vestiges of barbarism and slavery—superstition and the shameful practices surrounding it—from our land,” he commanded in 1863.47

  Geffrard didn’t need to invent new laws to attack Vodou: many of its practices had been criminalized for decades. President Boyer’s 1835 penal code declared that “all makers of ouangas, caprelatas, vaudoux, donpèdre, macandals and other spells will be punished by one to six months of imprisonment” along with a fine, and they could incur more serious punishment if the other “crimes or offenses” were committed in “preparing or carrying out their evil spells.” In addition, the law prohibited “all dances and other practices that are of a nature to maintain the spirit of fetishism and superstition in populations.” Boyer’s code also criminalized the use of substances that “without causing death, produce a lethargic effect”—a stipulation clearly aimed at zombification, a set of practices that would long fascinate and frighten observers in Haiti and beyond.*48

  Before Geffrard’s time, such anti-Vodou laws had rarely been enforced. Many of the country’s military officers and elites practiced the religion and had little appetite for carrying out repression against it. The arrival of Catholic priests, however, gave Geffrard a new kind of police force to help him confront these religious practices. Quite a few of these priests, unsurprisingly, had decided even before they left for Haiti that Vodou was a problem for the country’s population, locking them in the “rudest of pagan superstitions.” Such prejudices did not go away when they landed. One priest writing from Haiti in 1861 decried what he called the “diabolical meetings” of the religion, claiming that Vodou worshippers splattered religious objects with human blood. Another, describing Vodou as a “hellish invention,” lamented that the “drums and dance” were a serious obstacle to the conversion of the “ignorant masses.” Priests looking for converts in Haiti were also appalled to find that most of those who practiced Vodou considered themselves faithful Catholics—indeed, Vodou ceremonies usually began with Catholic prayers. Such cross-pollination, of course, only added to the priests’ anxiety.49

  Haitian communities had their own internal conflicts about the proper uses of spiritual power. Local secret societies, which efficiently shielded themselves from outside observers and occasionally even cultivated rumors of ritual murder as a way to keep prying eyes out, caused particular concern. And practitioners of Vodou sometimes accused each other of witchcraft, condemning those who called on the spirits for the purpose of harming others or for personal gain.50

  In 1864, eight Vodou practitioners in the town of Bizoton, outside Port-au-Prince, were accused by townspeople of having killed and eaten a young girl named Claircine. Their trial became a sensation, covered in detail in the Haitian press, and the government invited members of the foreign diplomatic community to attend the proceedings. Among those who accepted the invitation was the British consul general, Spenser St. John, who would later include a detailed account of the trial in his book Hayti; or, The Black Republic. St. John noted that the accused had all been beaten in order to force confessions. One of them, a woman named Roséide Sumera, had made as much clear during the trial: when the prosecutor declared that she had confessed to the crime, she acknowledged that she had done so, but added that he should “remember how cruelly I was beaten before I said a word.” Th
ese interrogation methods apparently did not bother St. John. The prisoners were convinced that they would be protected by “the Vaudoux,” he wrote, and “it required the frequent application of the club to drive this belief out of their heads.”51

  The prosecutor’s evidence centered on the remains of a girl, including a skull, which he claimed had been recovered near the scene of the crime and which were displayed during the trial. Of course, there are other possible explanations for the appearance of human remains than murder and cannibalism. They may, for instance, have been in the process of being prepared for funerary ritual, or perhaps for use in religious ceremonies, which sometimes make use of bones and skulls gathered from cemeteries. But combined with the extracted confessions and with statements from witnesses—in particular, one young child who claimed to have seen the killing and cooking of the victim—the evidence had the desired effect. After a two-day trial, the eight men and women, several of them elderly, were sentenced to death and killed by a firing squad. The government made the execution a major public event, scheduling it on a market day to assure the largest possible audience. The prosecutor, though, was only partially satisfied, having confided in St. John during the trial that “if full justice were done, there would be fifty on those benches instead of eight.”52

  The trial was in many ways directed at outsiders, an announcement that Haiti was ready to rid itself of what the editor of Haiti’s government newspaper called its “interior savages.” By targeting and criminalizing a subset of rural Haitians, Geffrard sought to brand Vodou as inessential, something that could easily be purged from the nation. In doing so, he hoped to free Haiti as a whole from being associated with these practices. The accused at the Bizoton trial seemed to understand that, in a sense, they were the ones being sacrificed to placate powerful external forces. “Why should I be put to death for observing our ancient customs?” one elderly woman on trial demanded.53