Haiti

  But in fact no president had a monopoly on violence within the heavily armed and regionalized society of nineteenth-century Haiti. If a ruler angered residents of a particular region, he might quickly find himself facing a dangerous uprising. The result was a balance in which regional armies served as a counterweight to the ambitions of central power, thus providing a mechanism to contain Haiti’s rulers. Heads of state who committed crimes of corruption or violence were never tried in the court of law, but they could be held to account, as one nineteenth-century observer put it, through the “summary judgment of revolution.” Given that the state was still primarily focused on extracting wealth from the countryside, the power of the quasiautonomous regions served as a significant and necessary means of protection for rural Haitians.17

  The frequency of insurrection did not mean that Haiti was constantly in the midst of widespread war. Campaigns were often relatively short, and many who fought in them quickly returned to their normal lives. In comparison with the major nineteenth-century wars in the United States and Europe, casualties seem to have been low. And while the conflicts usually culminated in attacks on the capital, they were scattered across different parts of the country, and some regions were spared altogether. Many Haitians were only peripherally involved in the political battles, and their lives were largely shaped instead by the social institutions in their rural communities. Indeed, the instability of the central government was probably perceived by many as an advantage. If the state offered little, it also lacked the power to take too much away.18

  Most rural residents focused the majority of their energy on cultivating their plots of land, which often continued to provide them with a comfortable existence. In 1948, a seventy-year-old man in the Marbial Valley in southern Haiti recalled his life as a child in the late nineteenth century. When spring came, he remembered, “it was a pleasure for the eyes to contemplate our gardens. The beans were ripening, corn was spiking up, the branches sunk under the weight of the calabashes.” Alongside his father’s house was a large plantation of coffee trees, whose harvests would enable the family to buy what they couldn’t grow for themselves. His father was so comfortable that he did something that would later be unthinkable: he cut down a grove of profitable coffee trees, his son recalled with some wonder, just “to build his house!”19

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  The thriving rural regions also brought prosperity to the port towns of Haiti, which benefited from the flow of peasants’ exports. The wealth of the port towns in turn continued to draw speculators and merchants from outside the country, who were happy to keep trading with Haiti regardless of who presided over Port-au-Prince. But the civil wars that racked the country during the second half of the nineteenth century did make it vulnerable to foreign intervention in new ways. Now, when violent outbursts caused property damage, foreign citizens frequently demanded compensation for their losses from the Haitian government itself. The fact that the destruction had taken place at the hands of one or another pretender to power, they argued, made the state responsible. These citizens had the support of their own governments, who repeatedly threatened to use force in the pursuit of individual claims.

  Private citizens abroad frequently call on their governments for help, of course, but the actions in Haiti were by all accounts extreme, amounting to brazen international extortion. Foreign governments and merchants consistently armed and sometimes openly supported various combatants in civil wars—as the British did with Geffrard in the 1860s—only to complain later that they had lost property during the conflicts. Having encouraged crises in the country, they then demanded that the Haitian state pay for what had happened to their citizens as a result. It was what one scholar has dubbed “a veritable expatriate industry of damage claims.”20

  In 1872, for instance, Germany sent two warships into the harbor of Port-au-Prince, demanding that Haiti pay some outstanding claims from German citizens. When the Haitian president refused, the Germans captured two Haitian warships in the harbor. After that, arrangements were quickly made to pay the German claims, and the two captured ships were released. Such capitulation only emboldened German merchants in their later dealings with the Haitian government. In 1885, one Haitian quipped that “Haiti is in the process of becoming a colony of Hamburg.” But the Germans were not the only ones who used this approach. In 1886, the British pursued a similar course when one of their citizens was arrested in Haiti, sending a warship into Port-au-Prince and successfully pressuring the Haitian government to release the man. French citizens also made claims against Haiti; these totaled more than a million francs, and the French government likewise threatened to send gunships if the sums were not paid. “We are dupes of their politics,” one Haitian writer lamented regarding the foreign powers, “victims of their intrigues, slaves of their capital.”21

  The 1805 Haitian constitution had made it illegal for foreigners to buy property in Haiti or for whites to become Haitian citizens. These provisions were maintained in subsequent constitutions, but foreign merchants found a way around the problem by marrying into Haitian families. Their Haitian wives could purchase and hold property in the country; at the same time, since the men remained foreign citizens, they could still demand indemnities from the Haitian government with the support of their home governments. By the 1870s, this merchant strategy had become so common that Haitian governments decided to enact additional restrictions surrounding Haitian citizenship. They took particular aim at Haitian women who married foreign men, eventually decreeing that if a Haitian woman married a foreigner she would lose her Haitian citizenship and would have to sell any property she owned within three months. Such nationality codes were shaped by deep-seated fears that foreign merchants might gain access to too much political and economic power in the country—yet another threat to the always-besieged Haitian sense of sovereignty.22

  The nationality laws, however, ultimately did little to prevent outsiders from gaining influence in Haiti, for the state itself was increasingly beholden on a massive scale to foreign banks. In 1874 and 1875 the Haitian government took out huge new loans from banks in France. The 1874 loan was meant primarily to cover the costs of paying the 1825 French indemnity, but it was extremely costly, with high commissions, so the next year the government decided to take out a second, much larger loan, in part in order to cover the expenses of the first. Within a few years, government debt skyrocketed from 16 million to 44 million francs.23

  Despite such massive expenditures, the Haitian government spent relatively little during these years on infrastructure development within the country. Instead, the whole process of foreign loans became a kind of racket as more and more bankers and merchants rushed to offer high-interest loans to Haiti, often promising significant kickbacks to the government officials who signed them. In addition to large loans like that of 1875, the Haitian government soon took out many short-term loans to cover its immediate costs, and in the following decades, government debt—long a major drain on the state treasury—began to spiral out of control. Through the 1890s, about 25 percent of Haiti’s state budget went to paying off debts (and roughly 30 percent to support the military). By 1898, fully 50 percent of the state budget was consumed by loan repayments, and by the 1913–14 budget year, that amount had climbed to over 67 percent.24

  These loans also had another long-term consequence. The increasing stake that French bankers had in Haiti led them in 1880 to create the Banque Nationale d’Haïti, which effectively took over the treasury of Haiti itself. The BNH, which was owned by the Société Général de Crédit Industriel et Commercial, printed Haitian money, charging the government a commission for doing so, and served as the depository for all Haitian tax revenues. Moreover, since there were no other banks in Haiti until the early twentieth century, the BNH had a monopoly on commercial banking activities in the country—the only official source for loans to private individuals or small businesses. The possibility of such business lending, of course, could well have contributed to improvements in
the commercial and agricultural life in Haiti. But the BNH wasn’t really a national bank: it was a French bank, whose accountability was to its French shareholders and not the Haitian people. This meant that the Haitian government, unlike the governments of most other nations, did not have the ability to set fiscal policy or embark on economic initiatives through the country’s bank. The only benefits the BNH really provided for Haiti ultimately accrued to a very small segment of the population with government connections. The state, always a fruitful prize, became an ever greater one.25

  The symbolism of German warships capturing Haitian ships in the Port-au-Prince harbor, or a new batch of Haitian currency arriving from the Direction de la Monnaie in Paris, was unmistakable. The country’s hold over its economic destiny seemed increasingly tenuous. And as the twentieth century approached, German merchants and French bankers were joined by the latest foreign power on the scene, one that would ultimately have an even greater impact on Haiti: the United States.

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  It was the steamship that made Haiti into a place of vital interest to the U.S. government. In the mid-nineteenth century, the adoption of steam power brought both new advantages and new complications for the navies of the great empires. Traditional sailing used a resource that, if fickle, was also free and often in endless supply: the wind. Steamships were better in many ways: they went faster, were bigger, and depended less on the vagaries of currents and breezes. But they needed to burn coal to make the steam that drove them, and thus they needed depots where they could stop to get that coal. For Britain, France, and Spain, the problem was not a serious one: they had colonies across the globe, and they built depots there for their steamships. If the United States wanted to compete with these countries, it needed to set up coaling stations, too, notably in the Caribbean. However, only a few locations there were not under the firm control of one of the other major empires. Because they were independent, the Dominican Republic and neighboring Haiti ironically became the most likely candidates for U.S. takeover.26

  Thanks to such considerations, the 1870s saw the return of the dreams of Caribbean annexation that had been popular in the American South before the Civil War. These aspirations, however, now came from very different quarters, with President Ulysses S. Grant as their most powerful new proponent. To build support for the idea, Grant enlisted the assistance of the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who enthusiastically embraced the proposal. This was a change of heart for him: before the Civil War, Douglass had been a vocal opponent of Caribbean annexation, which he saw as leading only to “more slavery, more ignorance and more barbarism.” After the war, though, Douglass saw annexation as a way of spreading the progressive values of U.S. society. At the time, he had reason to be optimistic, for it seemed possible that the federal government was going to truly guarantee the social and political rights of African Americans. And while Douglass was well aware of the broader forces driving U.S. designs—“Almost every great maritime nation,” he noted, “has some footing and foothold in the Caribbean sea but our own”—he also saw U.S. expansion as a way of bringing prosperity to the region. “It may, indeed, be important to know what Santo Domingo can do for us,” Douglass declared in 1871, “but it is vastly more important to know what we can do for Santo Domingo.” It was a statement, as the historian Millery Polyné points out, whose form and meaning anticipated American president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address of ninety years later, envisioning the United States as a force for progress and democracy in the hemisphere.27

  As Haitians watched warily, the attention of the United States focused first on the Dominican Republic, which was undergoing its own series of political upheavals. In 1861, Spain had retaken its former colony at the invitation of Pedro Santana, the Dominican president at the time. Their control proved short-lived, though: in 1865 the Dominican Republic threw off the Spanish mantle for the second time. But Dominican independence seemed to be a tenuous affair. In 1869, the new president of the Dominican Republic, Buenaventura Báez, signed a deal with an American envoy allowing the United States to annex the country if the United States took over the responsibility for $1.5 million in debt (roughly equivalent to $24 million today) that it owed to various creditors. In a way, the proposal, which enraged many Dominicans, was the reverse of the arrangement that Boyer had made with Haiti’s French indemnity: Báez was willing to sacrifice political independence for relief from economic dependence.28

  The annexation deal depended on ratification by the U.S. Congress, where it quickly ran into significant opposition. Senator Charles Sumner, who had been instrumental in helping Haiti win U.S. recognition, argued that the proposal was a violation of international law. Sumner was also convinced, as he wrote to a friend, that annexation would “menace Hayti,” and he was determined to prevent that from happening. The Haitian minister of foreign relations, Stephen Preston, agreed with Sumner about the danger of a U.S. presence on the island. He kept in close touch with the American senator, and hired journalists in the United States to mount a press campaign against Dominican annexation.29

  Báez and his supporters tried to woo the United States in part by emphasizing the contrast between their country and Haiti. They presented the Dominican Republic as a nation populated mainly by whites and, recalling the many cases of Haitian occupation, warned that they could easily be overrun by a black government. Báez accused his opponents of being in league with the Haitians and of intending to create in a situation in which “the African race shall dominate this island.” But this attempt to appeal to American prejudices failed. Indeed, when the U.S. Congress voted against the annexation scheme, one newspaper reported that they had done so mainly out of racism, concluding that “we have negroes enough at home without annexing an island full of them.”30

  Grant did not give up easily on his vision for the Caribbean, and two years later he sent a “fact-finding” mission to the Dominican Republic. Among its members was Frederick Douglass, who, on his return to the United States, went on a speaking tour promoting Dominican annexation. But despite support from Douglass and others, Grant was ultimately unable to overcome the mix of congressional opposition and general indifference to his plans. He later lamented that the United States had lost a great opportunity to solve several problems at once. If they had annexed the Dominican Republic, Grant explained, it could have become a “new home for the blacks, who were and I hear still are oppressed in the South.” As Southerners watched hundreds of thousands of their laborers leave for the Caribbean, Grant imagined, they would have been forced to understand “the crime of Ku-Kluxism, because they would see how necessary the black is to their own prosperity.” The United States, meanwhile, would have saved itself the trouble of importing tropical products. “We should have grown our own coffee and sugar, our own hardwoods and spices … We should have made of St. Domingo a new Texas or a New California.” And along the way, Grant added, “we should have had Hayti”—suggesting that once a part of Hispaniola became U.S. territory, the rest of the island would inevitably have come under U.S. control as well.31

  Haitians and Dominicans who opposed annexation knew that it had been a close call. When President Báez was overthrown in April 1874, the new Dominican government immediately began negotiations with Haiti for a treaty that was signed in September of that year. The core of the agreement between the countries was a promise by both nations to “maintain with all their strength and with all their power the integrity of their respective territories.” Neither country was to “cede, compromise nor alienate in favor of any foreign Power either the whole or any part of the territories or of the adjacent islands dependent on them.” Finally, they pledged “not to solicit or consent to any foreign annexation or domination.”32

  The treaty brought to an end the long-standing tradition in Haitian politics of periodically invading the eastern side of the island. Haitian leaders had repeatedly sought to forestall any foreign control on Hispaniola, which they considered a threat to their sovereignty,
by simply taking over their neighbor. Now, the two countries assumed joint responsibility for keeping their shared island under the control of its inhabitants. In its way, the 1874 agreement was a version of the Monroe Doctrine, which had insisted that European powers should not meddle in the affairs of independent nations in the Western Hemisphere. The Haitians and Dominicans made a similar point with their treaty—but they targeted the doctrine of nonintervention at the United States, which they deemed to be the most dangerous foreign power of all.33

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  Given the international tensions caused by U.S. expansionism, it is perhaps not surprising that many Haitians at the time had a negative view of their northern neighbor and lamented the rising power of the United States. “You are good at making machines,” one Haitian writer complained after spending a long train ride in Europe sitting next to a painfully talkative American, “but have a hard time coming up with ideas.” Many Haitian leaders described the United States as a hopelessly materialistic, uncouth, even backward country, not to mention a deeply racist one. In 1873 the prominent politician and intellectual Demesvar Delorme urged his compatriots to turn their backs on the United States and focus instead on Haiti’s long-standing connections to France.34

  A few prominent Haitians—including Anténor Firmin—did try to speak up for the United States, arguing that it would be a much more useful partner for economic development than France had ever been. (Firmin, after a stint as a schoolteacher, had become a well-known lawyer in Le Cap; though of humble origins, he was now a member of the town’s elite, married to the daughter of the deceased former president Salnave.) In Firmin’s view, the country had much to gain from establishing U.S. connections. He probably agreed with the Haitian politician who declared that a “marriage of love” with France was an impossible dream, and that Haitians ultimately had no choice but to join in “a marriage of convenience” with the United States.35