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 harbor 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
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
* * *
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 into 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
* * *
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 instance, 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.
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.” These 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
Geffrard’s attempt to reassure foreign observers largely backfired, however. Instead of proving to outsiders that Haiti was free from “superstition,” the Bizoton prosecutions were repeatedly cited as evidence that the country in fact harbored practitioners of ritual cannibalism. In his book, Spenser St. John was clearly eager to paint Haiti as a land of barbarism and savagery: he included a chapter titled “Vaudoux-Worship and Cannibalism” and then, just for good measure, followed it with another specifically titled “Cannibalism.” (He did allow that there was a split in Vodou between those who only sacrificed animals and others, a minority, who practiced human sacrifice.) Though he hadn’t personally witnessed the kinds of ceremonies he accused Haitians of practicing, St. John had clearly been welcomed into several Vodou temples, which didn’t seem particularly menacing: he described one as a “spacious” place “papered with engravings from the Illustrated London News” and “pictures of the Virgin Mary and various saints.” Still, despite the relative openness of various Haitian hosts, he seemed quite certain that at its heart, Vodou was somehow deeply sinister.54
Without any firsthand experience of rituals to draw on, the best St. John could do was to rehash a detailed description of a ceremony provided by Moreau de Saint-Méry in 1796 and insist that religious practices had remained essentially unchanged since then. He also located two supposed eyewitness accounts of child sacrifice—one by a French priest, another by a U.S. visitor who claimed to have been initiated into the secrets of Vodou by Dominican friends. Both writers described sneaking into ceremonies disguised in blackface, and both said that they saw a child being sacrificed and tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the proceedings.55
Such accounts were titillating, but a little too easy to dismiss as embellishments or full-out invention. In the trial at Bizoton, however, St. John felt he had found undeniable proof that cannibalism was rampant in the country. Though he complimented Geffrard on his efforts, St. John declared that the trial had done little to stop the practice of human sacrifice. “People are killed and their flesh sold at the market; children are stolen to furnish the repasts of cannibals; bodies are dug from their graves to serve as food, and the Vaudoux reign triumphant,” he announced. No important holiday passed, he claimed, without child sacrifice. These dramatic claims helped to make St. John’s book into a bestseller, and his success attracted numerous imitators. In 1891, one writer admitted that he had never actually seen a Vodou ceremony, but he nevertheless described the religion’s rituals in vivid detail—complete with Vodou practitioners “throwing themselves on the victims, tearing them apart with their teeth and avidly sucking the blood that boils from their veins.” Each day, he wrote, forty Haitians were eaten, and almost every citizen in the country had tasted human flesh. Such writings multiplied throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shaping the way that Haiti was perceived throughout Europe and the United States.56
As they watched increasing numbers of outsiders arrive in their country, meanwhile, some rural Haitians similarly saw them as carriers of an old but vividly remembered barbarism. Wandering near the ruins of the Sans-Souci palace in the 1870s, for example, the U.S. traveler Samuel Hazard found that many Haitians harbored hostility toward his countrymen. “Why do you dislike the Americans so much?” he asked. The invariable answer was that “the Americans wanted to come and take their lands and make them slaves.” Hazard did his best to be reassuring: the Haitians, he said, had nothing to fear from the United States, which had freed its slaves and was generously educating them. Of course, his Haitian interlocutors might have felt some reasonable suspicion at the lateness of the American conversion to the cause of emancipation, which they themselves had fought for three-quarters of a century before. But more importantly, Hazard’s literal interpretation of the threat of a return to slavery also missed the point. In Haiti, the colonial past served as a metaphor, a specter of forced labor and external control. Taken in this way, the Haitians’ perspective on U.S. intentions was in fact quite clear-eyed. The long-desired recognition of Haiti by the United States opened the way for more and more American involvement in Haiti and its political life. During the coming decades, U.S. corporations and banks would gain an increasing foothold in Haiti, and in their wake would come U.S. marines. In the end, the fear of the return of a certain kind of slavery turned out to be perfectly justified.57