Haiti

  Firmin and Delorme would clash again in the late 1870s, when they found themselves on opposite sides of a political debate that divided Haiti’s intellectual class throughout the final decades of the nineteenth century. Firmin became a key figure in the powerful Liberal Party, whose slogan was “Government by the Most Competent” and whose political philosophy was undisguisedly antipopulist. Many of its members argued that only Haiti’s elites had the education and capacity necessary to confront the country’s challenges and that Haiti was simply not ready for popular democracy: “The supremacy of numbers assures the supremacy of ignorance.” Delorme, meanwhile, became a major presence in the competing National Party, which responded to the Liberal Party’s claims with its own slogan: “The Greatest Good to the Greatest Number.”36

  Both parties openly framed their arguments in terms of skin color. The Liberals made no secret of the fact that the elites whom they put forward as Haiti’s best hope were mostly light-skinned. The Nationals, on the other hand, believed that Haiti’s problems were mostly caused by mulatto politicians and by the weakness of black leaders who had allowed mulattoes to manipulate and use them. Louis-Joseph Janvier, one of the great theorists of the National Party, made a point of praising Christophe and other black rulers throughout Haiti’s history.

  The analogies to early Haitian history ran deeper than Janvier would probably have been willing to admit, however. Just as Christophe and Pétion had presided over nominally different styles of government—a kingdom in the north, a republic in the south—yet ruled in similarly autocratic ways, so, too, the National and Liberal parties ended up much alike despite their differing self-presentations. Both were interested in small-scale democratic reforms and in increasing intellectuals’ involvement in government; neither envisioned a real expansion of political participation to include the masses of rural Haitians. When the National Party came to power, they did help bring more blacks into the political class. But, their slogan notwithstanding, they didn’t address the fundamental divide between that elite and the rest of the population—the deeper structures of power and exclusion in the society—which remained largely unaltered.37

  What’s more, the divisions by skin color were also never as absolute as the two parties would have it. After all, Christophe, the black leader lauded by the Nationals, had carefully assembled an aristocracy for his court that included many notable light-skinned men. Meanwhile, Firmin, that staunch proponent of the Liberal elites, was himself black, as were a few other prominent members of the Liberal Party. In the late 1870s, when Firmin ran for local office in Le Cap, the National Party opposition attacked him by declaring that he was “as light-skinned as a white man”—but that was a calculated lie.38

  Firmin lost the election in Le Cap, and a few years later he decided to move to Paris. There he found himself among other expatriates from the Caribbean and Latin America. The Puerto Rican nationalist Ramón Emeterio Betances organized a salon in the city at which various thinkers from throughout the region gathered, talked, and plotted. Firmin was also invited to join the Anthropological Society of Paris, of which Louis-Joseph Janvier was already a member. Though they had some welcoming allies, Janvier and Firmin found themselves largely in hostile territory. At the time, the ideas of the Comte de Gobineau, who had penned his famous Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races in the 1850s, dominated European thought on the question of the origins of the human species and the reasons for differences in color and culture. As they took their seats at the Anthropological Society, the two Haitians thus joined an organization where most members strongly believed that black people were inherently and irredeemably inferior. It was, as Firmin wrote, a rather strange situation. Although he initially kept quiet, not wanting to stir up trouble and be perceived as an “intruder,” the experience left him in a fury. Soon he found a way to channel the experience into something productive: he published The Equality of the Human Races, an impassioned refutation of Gobineau and the dominant racial theories of the day.39

  Firmin’s book skewered the European intellectuals, famous and obscure, who had lined up behind spurious theories of racial difference. In one short chapter, called “Prejudices and Vanities,” Firmin simply listed racist comments by “men who are generally considered authoritative voices in science and philosophy,” from Immanuel Kant to Ernest Renan. Clearly, he wrote, the notion of the inequality of the human races was “deeply rooted in the minds of the most enlightened men of Europe”—so deeply that “they seem incapable of ever discarding it.” Yet none of these intellectual luminaries had ever offered solid support for that idea: they believed in the inferiority of blacks, Firmin argued, not because that belief was reasonable or logical, but because the history of slavery and colonialism had produced, shaped, and ultimately naturalized that prejudice.40

  It was high time to change the situation. There was, Firmin insisted, only one human race. If anthropology were to be a true positivist science, it needed to escape from the thrall of untenable racist theories based on scattered anecdotal evidence and devote itself to its real calling: the study of human societies, in all their complexity, through careful scientific method. Firmin’s book took its readers on a journey from Egypt to India to Africa, showing the flimsiness of the support for the principle of racial inequality. And he argued that Haiti, in particular, provided a clear refutation of all the assertions of racist science: a nation of blacks had produced brilliant poets, statesmen, and intellectuals.

  In a playful response to the “scientific” idea that whites were inherently more beautiful, Firmin even included in his book a list of some particularly good-looking Haitian men. He recalled seeing, among the aides-de-camp of a Haitian general, “a young Black man so mesmerizingly handsome that one could not take one’s eyes off his face.” He also described another “handsome specimen of the Black race,” the director of the customs office at Le Cap: “I still remember how visiting foreigners who came through the town’s port often neglected the business at hand to gaze admiringly at this man whose handsome features were enhanced by his black skin.” The “physical beauty” of such men, Firmin suggested, gave “the lie to the fanciful descriptions of ethnographers.” Though his tone was lighthearted, Firmin was making a serious point. For each supposed “scientific observation” deployed to justify racist theories, he could provide an opposite example. Of course, his observations were based on his personal experience as a Haitian; but those of the supposed scientists on the other side were just as personal, the product of their own European background, and not in any way universal.41

  Firmin’s work was largely ignored by European anthropology, which continued for decades to focus on racial differences and hierarchy. It would take another generation before a new set of thinkers, led by Franz Boas in the United States, began to dismantle the racist “science” that Firmin had lambasted. And it took much longer yet for Firmin to begin to assume his rightful place in the history of anthropological thought; the first English translation of his work was not produced until 2002. In Haiti, however, Firmin’s powerful attack on European racism gained him many admirers and established him as one of the country’s most revered intellectuals.42

  * * *

  Firmin returned to Haiti in 1888 and found the country in the midst of yet another civil war, one not unlike the conflict which he had experienced during his teenage years in Le Cap. A coalition of regional armies had overthrown the president and put a general from the west of the country, François Denys Légitime, into power. But an officer from Le Cap, Florville Hyppolite, had immediately launched an insurrection against Légitime. Hyppolite’s movement was nourished by longstanding grievances among residents of the north, who had complained for decades about the fact that the central government collected enormous revenues from the agriculturally productive region and provided almost nothing in return. (As one rebel group had put it in the 1870s, a few “plumed generals” in Port-au-Prince were “fattening themselves on the sweat of the North.”) Hyppolite pledged
that he would allow the region to control its own finances, enabling it to escape such exploitation.43

  Firmin decided to support the uprising, and Hyppolite, impressed by his intellectual and political credentials, named him the movement’s minister of exterior relations. Firmin’s primary mission was to get U.S. backing for the insurrection. Like Salnave several decades earlier, Hyppolite hoped that if he promised trade concessions to the United States and discussed the possibility of allowing them to have access to a naval base in Haiti, he could gain valuable military assistance against his opponent. He understood the political reality of late-nineteenth-century Haiti: any struggle for power within the country now depended upon support from outside.44

  For the most part, the U.S. government found the ongoing civil wars in Haiti perplexing and concerning. “The situation is becoming intolerable,” wrote one exasperated State Department official in 1888. “Hayti is a public nuisance at our doors.” But in 1889, James Blaine, appointed as secretary of state by the newly elected President Benjamin Harrison, saw an opportunity in the conflicts within Haiti. Blaine was a major proponent of a diplomatic approach known as Pan-Americanism, which sought to create networks of cooperation and trade between nations of the Western Hemisphere. In the opening speech of the International American Conference that he organized in Washington in October 1889, Blaine declared that “friendship and not force, the spirit of just law and not the violence of the mob should be the recognized rule of administration between American nations and in American nations.” Increased trade and better communication, he proclaimed, would enable each nation to “acquire the highest possible advantage from the enlightened and enlarged intercourse of all.” Blaine’s Pan-Americanism was also driven by less lofty motives: he was especially concerned that the huge profits to be made by trading with Latin America were making their way “to England, France, Germany and other countries” instead of to the United States.45

  Blaine proceeded carefully in developing his policy toward Haiti. He first contacted Stephen Preston, Haiti’s minister to Washington, who was representing President Légitime. Withholding official recognition from Légitime’s government, Blaine confronted Preston with a series of demands. He wanted Haiti to grant the United States a naval station in Haiti and to agree to be represented in European countries by the U.S. envoys to those countries. Preston—surprised particularly by the second demand, which he considered an infringement on Haiti’s sovereignty—rejected both proposals.46

  Having gained little from Légitime, Blaine turned his attentions to Hyppolite’s insurgent movement. Firmin had already succeeded in getting Hyppolite a steady supply of high-end weapons—one shipment, for example, included seventeen Gatling guns—from an American merchant named William P. Clyde, who owned a fleet of steamships called the West India Line. Now, the U.S. government provided Firmin with arms shipments as well as naval support, giving Hyppolite’s insurgency the edge it needed to triumph. In October 1899, he took over Haiti’s presidency, and he brought Firmin to Port-au-Prince with him.47

  The U.S. press had a high opinion of Firmin, complimenting him by describing him as the “Haitian Blaine.” Hyppolite’s opponents, however, were quick to attack the new regime by criticizing its cozy relationship with the United States. A group calling itself the League for the Maintenance of National Independence denounced Hyppolite as a tool of foreign interests, claiming that he had made a secret deal to cede the port of Môle Saint-Nicolas to the Americans. Firmin and Hyppolite both denied the allegation, but William Clyde claimed that one of their agents had indeed offered the United States access to a port in return for American support during the insurrection. While the truth about the matter is difficult to determine, it was all too easy for people to believe that such a deal had been made, given how openly Hyppolite had cultivated and depended on U.S. support in his struggle for the presidency.48

  It was also abundantly clear to Haitians that Blaine and the U.S. government were in fact avidly eyeing Môle Saint-Nicolas, unlike their predecessors who had rebuffed Salnave in the 1860s. In his inaugural address, U.S. president Harrison had made a point of mentioning that “the necessities of our navy require convenient coaling stations and dock and harbor privileges.” The navy ordered one of its admirals, Bancroft Gherardi, to gather a “full and detailed description of all coaling stations in the West Indies,” and the Môle was high on the list of sought-after spots. When Harrison had to choose a new minister to Haiti, he therefore carefully looked for someone who might be able to successfully negotiate a delicate deal with the Black Republic. The man he settled on was Frederick Douglass.49

  It was an inspired choice. Stephen Preston rejoiced when he heard the news, calling it a “miracle” and effusing that, at least for the moment, the danger “of attempts to annex a part of our territory” had passed. Blaine, meanwhile, wrote to Douglass that his appointment to Haiti was a potent symbol of the American desire to secure “the peace, welfare, and prosperity of that warring and dissatisfied people.” Back in 1861, Douglass had written proudly of Haiti as “a refutation of the slanders and disparagements of our race,” but his plans to visit the country had been interrupted by the U.S. Civil War. Nearly thirty years later, he would finally be able to spend time in the land he admired.50

  Douglass’s appointment, however, came in a very different context from either the 1860s or the early 1870s, when he had optimistically labored on behalf of annexation of the Dominican Republic. By the late 1880s, many of the gains of Reconstruction had been reversed, and Douglass was much more subdued about the extent to which the United States could serve as a progressive and democratic force. Within a few years, a Supreme Court case involving Homer Plessy—a Louisiana man descended from migrants who had come from Saint-Domingue to New Orleans in the early nineteenth century—would signal the federal government’s official acceptance of racial segregation. As he arrived in Haiti, Douglass thus found himself in a curious and uncomfortable position, distrusting to a large extent the true intentions of the country that he served.51

  * * *

  As he settled into the presidency, Hyppolite began what had become a nearly unavoidable ritual for new national leaders in Haiti: rewriting the constitution. For decades, constitutions had come and gone in Haiti with remarkable rapidity. A nineteenth-century proverb put it succinctly: “Constitusyon sé papié, bayonet sé fer”—“Constitutions are made of paper, bayonets of iron.” Rebel leaders usually won the presidency by making sweeping promises to their supporters in rural areas: if they won, they claimed, they would expand political rights, carry out land reform, decentralize public institutions. Once they attained power, producing a new constitution was the best way to show that they were serious about reform. But often the constitutional changes were mostly cosmetic, or else designed to make it easier for the new president to hold on to the position he had just won. None of the constitutional revisions really fulfilled perennial popular demands: increased political access for the masses and limitations on presidential power. The 1889 constitution produced by Hyppolite was, in a sense, no different: though it clarified some key issues, in many ways it maintained the structure of earlier documents. The main difference was that, as things turned out, it would remain in force for nearly thirty years.52

  Firmin was an active participant in the writing of the new constitution, and he was proud that he did achieve one major change: the elimination of a long-standing article that made it impossible for whites to become Haitian citizens. In 1804, Dessalines had allowed a certain number of whites who had supported independence to become Haitian citizens, but the 1816 constitution made it clear that other whites would not be eligible for naturalization. From then on, Haitian constitutions had consistently declared in one form or another that all “Africans and Indians” could become Haitian citizens, but “no white” could do so. But Firmin, among others, believed that it no longer made sense to maintain a racial barrier around Haitian citizenship, and the 1889 constitution declared: “Any foreign
er can become a Haitian citizen by following the regulations established by the law.” It was a significant shift, but also only a partial one. Hyppolite’s constitution still maintained the long-standing exclusion of whites from land ownership, and it made clear that this applied even to those whites who had been naturalized as Haitian citizens.53

  During the constitutional debates Firmin also pushed for provisions that would contain executive power, but he had only partial success. In the end, the president ultimately retained the right to nominate senators as well as to veto legislation. Firmin did manage to remove an article allowing the president to dissolve the parliament at will, a significant victory. And the constitution introduced a significant innovation by answering the demands for decentralization that had been a central part of the insurrection. State finances were now decentralized, with regional taxes going into regional coffers. The change was aimed in part at decreasing corruption in the government, something Firmin would pursue directly over the following years, earning himself many enemies in the process.54

  Having promulgated the new constitution, Hyppolite and Firmin quickly turned to the pressing question of how to deal with the United States. When the Haitian president first met with the newly arrived Frederick Douglass, the American diplomat made a pitch for happy globalization. “The growing commercial intercommunication of various nationalities, so important to the dissemination of knowledge, to the enlargement of human sympathies and to the extinction of hurtful prejudices,” he effused, was not a “menace to the autonomy of nations.” Hyppolite, a little skeptically, agreed that there was nothing wrong with international exchange, but he added that “each nation has the right to be proud of its autonomy.”55