5

LOOKING NORTH

“Will Haiti work?” an anxious Anténor Firmin wondered in 1905. One of Haiti’s most celebrated intellectuals and statesmen, Firmin had spent his life grappling with three demons: European racism, U.S. expansionism, and Haitian authoritarianism. Now, living in political exile at the twilight of his career, he wrote a book comparing Haiti’s history to that of the United States and evaluating the possible benefits and threats to Haiti from its northern neighbor. The United States was now the most powerful political force in the region, Firmin advised his countrymen, and Haiti had to find a way to deal with it.1

Firmin did not think that Haiti should give itself over completely to U.S. influence. He brushed off, for instance, the notion that Haitians should abandon French and turn to English as the main language of their country—an idea first proposed by Christophe in the 1810s and echoed by some Haitian intellectuals in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, however, Firmin distanced himself from those who considered the United States a profound danger to Haitian sovereignty. Instead of “getting caught up in an irrational suspicion,” he wrote, Haitians should instead “study the question with history books in their hands.” Among foreign powers, he argued, the United States was the one that had shown itself “most respectful of their rights as an independent people.” Firmin was well aware that the United States had been the last power to officially recognize Haiti’s independence, but during the decades of his active political life he had seen more British and German gunships than American ones brazenly intervene in Haitian affairs. More importantly, Firmin had an idealistic conviction that the United States would always remain true to its founding principles and therefore respect the independence of other countries. In any case, he added as if to reassure himself, the United States didn’t need Haiti. Of all the great “occidental powers,” they had the lowest population density—fewer than twenty-five people per square mile—and therefore the least need for colonies.2

The key for Haiti, Firmin wrote, was to figure out how to thrive under the “colossal shadow” cast by the United States—how to “grow, develop, without ever letting itself be absorbed.” In this task, he thought, Haiti could count on help from the Americans themselves. It was in the United States’ best interest to make sure that Haiti “strengthened and civilized itself,” so that European powers would no longer “molest” the country. In the long run, the United States might even become Haiti’s savior, providing what the country needed to become “an active and laborious civilization.” The Americans “have capital of all kinds,” Firmin noted: “money, machines, experience of hard work, and the moral energy necessary to confront difficult circumstances.” They could “offer us that helping hand we have been looking for throughout the past century.”3

Firmin also thought that the United States could serve as an institutional example. The alternation of parties in power, he wrote, guaranteed political stability. He effused that of all the countries in the world, the U.S. social and political system combined liberty and equality in the most successful fashion. American citizens, he argued, put the national good over individual ambitions. Firmin even downplayed the continuing racial discrimination in the United States. He celebrated Lincoln, and while he admitted that African Americans had yet to secure full rights, he predicted confidently that the problem would be fully resolved within a century. Going further, he asserted that the United States could actually provide a model of racial egalitarianism for Haiti, which suffered from its own conflicts between mulattoes and blacks.4

For all its optimism, though, Firmin’s analysis also carried a note of caution. With such a dominant neighbor, Haitians urgently had to solve their own problems; otherwise they would be inviting disaster, opening the way for the violation and destruction of their precious sovereignty. The power of the United States, its “almost undisputed preponderance” in the hemisphere, was inescapable, he wrote, and Haiti needed to act accordingly. “Instead of putting ourselves in the position of trying to block an impetuous and irresistible torrent,” Haiti had to allow itself to be “productively watered” by the flood of U.S. power. Otherwise, Firmin warned, “we’ll be carried away trying to block it, in a gesture as reckless as it is hopeless.”5

*   *   *

Growing up in Le Cap in the 1860s, Firmin got an early education in the vagaries and violence of Haitian politics. He was nine years old when Soulouque was overthrown by Geffrard, and within a few years insurgents had in turn risen up against the new president. Among them was a prominent officer named Sylvain Salnave, who set up his headquarters in Le Cap. Fighting to remain in power, Geffrard secured military support from the British, and in 1865, British warships bombarded Le Cap on two occasions, targeting its public buildings and reducing its forts to rubble.6

Salnave, for his part, sought assistance from the United States, hoping that U.S. warships would help him blockade Port-au-Prince. “Since we are an American nation like the United States,” his officers wrote in an appeal for aid, “we wish to unite ourselves in a close bond of political and commercial friendship with your government.” With U.S. military assistance, Salnave explained, he could overthrow Geffrard. Then, once he won, he would be in a position to offer the United States special military and commercial privileges. Most significantly, Salnave was prepared to provide access to a spectacular naval station in Haiti: the port of Môle Saint-Nicolas.7

The Môle sits astride a beautiful and protected bay on Haiti’s northwestern tip, directly across from Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Dubbed the “Gibraltar of the West Indies,” it was described by a British officer in the late eighteenth century as the best harbor he had ever seen—perhaps the best “in the world,” and one that could shelter any European navy. Salnave knew that the United States, which had made frequent use of a coaling station set up at Le Cap during the Civil War, needed such ports. But he overestimated the American government’s interest at the time. His offer was rejected. “We have no purposes or designs of acquisition or aggrandizement within the territory of Hayti,” wrote the U.S. secretary of state.8

Even without U.S. aid, Salnave garnered enough support within Haiti to establish himself as president in 1867. But his rule was short-lived. In 1869, his opponents invaded Port-au-Prince and attacked the National Palace. Salnave had turned it into an armory, packing it with guns and ammunition, and when the shelling started, the palace exploded. It was a fitting symbol for Haiti’s political situation, as competing groups appeared ready to sacrifice nearly everything for control of the state, even the state itself.9

The second half of the nineteenth century was a time of seemingly constant civil war in Haiti. Between 1843 and 1889, there were twelve presidents and nearly as many constitutions: eight in all, along with several constitutional amendments. Almost always, the changes in government came as the result of a military campaign in which the president was ousted by a rebel at the head of a regional army. The new constitutions, as historian Claude Moïse points out, were never the “result of a national consensus,” or even of “agreement among the ruling classes.” Instead, they were largely tools used to maintain control of the state and to divide up the spoils that came with it. The discussions surrounding each new constitution focused primarily on just one question: how much power the president would have within the system.10

And yet Haiti enjoyed an oddly stable form of instability. While control of the national government in Port-au-Prince constantly shifted as the result of civil war, the local political structures in most of Haiti’s regions remained largely unchanged. The military commanders of each district ran the local governments and managed much of the administration of people’s daily lives—policing communities, overseeing taxation, and distributing government resources. Though there were certainly other influential groups, especially in the towns—merchants, journalists, professionals—local power remained in the hands of military leaders. And although the district commanders were sometimes replaced when a new government came to power in Port-au-Prince, many stayed in their positions for years, even decades, providing a certain continuity despite the frequent changes in leadership on the national level.

In a district outside Croix-des-Bouquets, for instance, an officer named Caliska Calice held sway for nearly four decades. A French merchant who visited him around 1904 wrote that Calice had used his influence to “assure calm” in his district on behalf of the many national governments that had succeeded each other over the decades. He had a comfortable life: he greeted his visitor wearing a pink bathrobe decorated with red flowers and showed him around his property, which included a large garden producing corn, manioc, and potatoes, surrounded by large and productive palm trees. There were several buildings organized around a courtyard, where Calice acted as a judge for local conflicts, hosted dances and cockfights, and dispensed medical and psychiatric help to those who needed it.11

The Haitian army, thus, was used not so much to defend the country as to run it. Military service remained the primary route to social advancement, especially because officers got not only a salary but also often local power and access to land. Over time, the army became both bloated and top-heavy. Each new president brought to power by insurrection incorporated a new group of officers into his regime, and they often stayed on even after their benefactors were overthrown. “The only thing left to do,” one president quipped, was to “issue a decree making everyone a general.” In 1867 there were about 20,000 soldiers in Haiti (in a population of 700,000 or so), and of these, a startling 13,500 were officers.12

The military was far from unified or centrally controlled. The civil wars often pitted army divisions from different regions against the president in Port-au-Prince. Though the insurgencies frequently involved a patchwork of groups, they generally coalesced either in the north of the country or in the southern peninsula—regions that operated with considerable economic autonomy. Indeed, nineteenth-century Haiti can best be described as a confederation of eleven largely independent regions, each with its own port town, merchant elites, landowners, and market system. The regions specialized in the production of different crops, with the north focused largely on coffee and dyewood exports, for instance, while some plains in the south concentrated on growing cane for the production of rum and for local sugar consumption. Port-au-Prince was one of the larger ports, of course, and as the center of the government it occupied a unique role in this broader matrix. But it was not the dominant economic and political center that it would become in the twentieth century. Le Cap essentially functioned as an alternative capital, with a thriving economic life. Many residents in the north resented the central government in Port-au-Prince, as did their counterparts in the south, nursing grievances that could easily fuel uprisings against the state.13

Direct popular participation in Haiti’s political institutions, meanwhile, remained quite limited. Theoretically, nineteenth-century constitutions granted the right to vote to most Haitian men over the age of twenty-one. But for reasons that remain unclear, theory and practice diverged substantially, and even in urban areas, very few people voted. In Port-au-Prince in 1870, only nine hundred men were registered to vote. By 1888 the situation had improved somewhat, but nevertheless, of fifty thousand residents of Port-au-Prince, only four thousand were registered, and no more than eight hundred actually voted. In smaller towns and in the countryside, voting was even rarer, and elections were often manipulated by local officers. The majority of Haitians were thus almost totally excluded from the political process.14

Insurrection, on the other hand, was open to all. Regional leaders who wanted to overthrow the central regime gathered followers from among the general population, taking advantage of the fact that Haitians on the whole were well armed and many had experience in military conflicts. Most of these leaders presented themselves as populists, making vague promises about a more equitable distribution of land and money. But while each new regime created some turnover within the ruling class, little changed in the broader structures of power. Most of the political promises made by insurrectionary leaders were never fulfilled, setting the stage for a continuing cycle of uprisings.15

The constant threat of insurrection in turn shaped government action. Once they gained power, even leaders who saw themselves as liberal reformers and decried the repressive nature of the previous government quickly became convinced that they could survive only by eliminating their enemies. They responded harshly to all forms of opposition, even those channeled through parliamentary means, seeing disagreement as a threat to national governance rather than a constitutive part of it. With a new uprising threatening Port-au-Prince every few years, political leaders could nearly always claim that the security of the government was in danger and on that basis justify almost anything. Indeed, Haitian president Lysius Salomon, who ruled from 1879 to 1888, admitted with striking candor: “I like coups d’état. You can’t govern without them.” The trick to ruling, he went on, was to “take as much advantage as possible” of a crisis—whatever its provenance—in order to justify a stranglehold on executive power. In 1908, one Haitian observer wrote that governments resided in the National Palace as if they were “camped in enemy country,” always ready to carry out “extreme measures” against their own citizens like an occupying army.16

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

*   *   *

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.

*   *   *

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

*   *   *

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

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 foreigner 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

Sympathetic and knowledgeable about Haitian history, Douglass was well aware that Haitians had good reason to be sensitive about the threat of external forces. He warned Secretary of State Blaine that it did not help the American cause when a U.S. Navy ship arrived to inspect the harbor of Môle Saint-Nicolas without permission from the Haitian government. It was too easy for opponents of the new regime in Haiti to seize on such actions as proof that the government was ready to “sell the country to the Americans.” In fact, the U.S. Navy regarded the Môle as very nearly theirs already; a report by Admiral Gherardi had concluded that if they approached the Haitians with the right mixture of firmness and strategy, the port could be acquired with little difficulty.56

Douglass left Haiti for much of 1890, returning at the end of the year with official instructions to begin negotiations for the Môle. On New Year’s Day 1891, he called on Firmin. It was a remarkable meeting of minds: the two men, though of different generations, were major intellectual figures who had worked throughout their lives to defeat racism. There was no time for learned discussion, however. Firmin focused on expressing his worries about the intentions of the United States; Douglass, in return, tried to reassure his Haitian colleague that while his government was indeed interested in acquiring a coaling station, they would do so only through “proper means” that were “consistent with the peace and welfare of Haiti.”57

Such reassurances probably pleased Firmin, but back in the United States, Douglass was getting a reputation for being a bit too sensitive to the Haitian perspective. One of his strongest critics was U.S. entrepreneur William Clyde, the owner of the West India Line. In 1889, having helped Hyppolite get into power with arms sales, he negotiated a contract with the Haitian president that would give his company a monopoly concession to run steamships between the United States and seven Haitian ports. Clyde also offered Hyppolite the right to transform these steamships into warships if needed, as well as to use them to carry troops, weapons, and ammunition within Haiti itself. In return, the Haitian government was to subsidize the steamship operations, paying Clyde $480,000 over the course of five years (the equivalent of $11.3 million in today’s currency). According to Clyde, Firmin originally signed the deal but then temporized, deciding not to submit it for final approval to the Haitian legislature. Firmin clearly realized that, given the ongoing criticism of Hyppolite’s close relationship with the United States, the opposition would seize on news of this contract to attack him. A frustrated Clyde asked Douglass to pressure the Haitian government to finalize the deal. When it became clear that this wasn’t going to happen, Clyde insisted that the Haitians should pay him for the “time and money” he had expended trying to set up his concession in their country. Douglass, with a dose of incisive humor, responded disbelievingly to Clyde: “Then, sir, as they will not allow you to put a hot poker down their backs, you mean to make them pay you for heating it!” Clyde was not amused. “In his eyes,” Douglass wrote, “I was more a Haïtien than an American.”58

In March 1891, an article in the New York Herald attacked Douglass for, among other things, being black. If it was to gain the respect of Haitians, the article argued, the United States needed a white diplomatic representative, “for the people [in Haiti] look upon a colored man as one of themselves, whereas they unwittingly recognize the superiority of the white race, although they will never admit it.” They needed, the author suggested, a strong white hand to guide them: “To let Haiti alone is to allow her to follow her own path back to barbarism.” Douglass responded that Haitians would see right through a white diplomat who tried to “play the hypocrite and pretend to love negroes in Haïti when he is known to hate negroes in the United States.” Furthermore, he insisted, strong-arm tactics were not necessary. “The American people are too great to be small,” Douglass wrote hopefully, and it was their duty to treat Haiti with respect and justice. If, instead, the United States planned on preying on Haiti’s weaknesses and fears, on acquiring concessions through the “dread of our power,” then Douglass admitted he was not the right person to represent the United States. “I am charged with sympathy for Haiti,” Douglass declared. “I am not ashamed of that charge.”59

The attacks against Douglass worked. Though Secretary of State Blaine realized that he couldn’t get rid of Douglass entirely without inciting an outcry in both Haiti and the United States, he also concluded that he couldn’t trust him to get the Môle. So Blaine sent Admiral Gherardi to Haiti, where he essentially took over the negotiations with the Haitian government that should have been under Douglass’s control. Looking back bitterly on the negotiations later on, Douglass wrote that the overweening attitude of Gherardi had the opposite of the intended effect, undermining his government’s chances of getting what they wanted. In his first meeting with Firmin and President Hyppolite, Gherardi aggressively claimed that a promise had already been made to lease the Môle to the United States years before by an agent of Hyppolite who had traveled to the U.S. during the insurrection. When Firmin disagreed, the admiral responded with a set of veiled threats, declaring ominously that if his request were refused, the United States would have to force Haiti into assuming its “moral obligation.” He also told Firmin that “it was the destiny of the Môle to belong to the United States.” Douglass, meanwhile, attempted to be more conciliatory, as well as more vague, arguing that the concession would be “consistent with the autonomy of Haïti” and a “source of strength rather than weakness.” He proposed that providing the United States with a coaling station would help Haiti to end its national isolation and “touch the world at all points that make for civilization and commerce.”60

In many ways, Firmin likely agreed with Douglass; his later writings about Haiti’s relationship to the United States present similar arguments about the need for open trade. He also understood that given the strategic importance of the Môle in the Caribbean, both the United States and European powers would continue to covet the site. Firmin saw that the United States was clearly the rising power in the region and probably saw the Môle negotiations as a remarkable opportunity. If a deal went through, Haiti could gain income from leasing the port to the Americans, and could also press them for better trade policies and other concessions. In its relations with foreign powers, Haiti had few bargaining chips, but the port was one of them.

The problem was that, given popular fears about the implications of U.S. control—rooted both in long-standing worries about a loss of autonomy and in knowledge of the racism of their neighbor to the north—it was extremely difficult for the Hyppolite regime to negotiate without opening itself up to the dangerous charge of selling out the population to foreign interests. Firmin knew Haitian politics, and the particular situation that his government was in, well enough to realize that it would be extremely difficult to accept the U.S. request. Indeed, Firmin told Gherardi and Douglass as much in their first discussion. He admitted that “if someone must have” the Môle, it should be the United States, but he explained that such a concession would be the end of Hyppolite’s government. So he stalled for time, asking for further documentation from the U.S. officials.61

In April 1891, an increasingly impatient Gherardi, along with Douglass, went to see Firmin and press him on the Môle issue. This time, they had backup, of a sort: the U.S. Navy sent four warships into the harbor of Port-au-Prince, adding to the three American warships already anchored there. The population of the town was, of course, alarmed by the display of force, and Firmin, under pressure, promised a final response on the request. But to the surprise of the U.S. envoys, it was a polite but firm no.62

Firmin agreed that, in principle, the cession of Môle Saint-Nicolas could have been arranged to the benefit of both countries. The problem, however, was in the details. In addition to asking for a long-term lease of the Môle, the United States had insisted that Haiti must also promise not to rent any part of its territory to any other government, nor grant any “special privilege or usage rights” to another foreign power. This was more than an articulation of the Monroe Doctrine—it sought to set up a privileged deal in which territorial control would be given to the United States and no one else. For Firmin, it was too much. To accept such a condition, he wrote, would constitute an “outrage against the national sovereignty of Haiti and a flagrant violation of Article 1 of our Constitution for, in renouncing our right to dispose of our territory, we will have tacitly accepted its alienation.”63

The other problem, Firmin explained, was that the United States was being a bully. The fact that they had sent warships to Port-au-Prince—a clear attempt to threaten Haiti—made it impossible for Haiti’s government to accept the U.S. request, for if they did so, the Haitians would “seem to cede to foreign pressure and therefore, ipso facto, to compromise our existence as an independent people.” This was especially true, Firmin added, because U.S. newspapers had been spreading “lies” and declaring that an agreement to grant Môle Saint-Nicolas to the United States as a naval station had already been made. Firmin wrapped up his refusal by insisting that it was not an act of “ill will” on Haiti’s part and that his country remained committed to maintaining its relations with “the most glorious and the most generous Republic of the New World and perhaps of the modern World.”64

Firmin was clearly proud of his message to the United States: he reprinted it in his 1905 book as a reminder of what he had accomplished. And he was celebrated in Haiti for having stood up to its overbearing neighbor the United States. “Firmin’s pen,” notes one historian, “managed to displace the seven beautiful, brand-new warships, planted in the harbor of Port-au-Prince during the negotiations.” The action gave him enormous political legitimacy—he became “a hero, a legend,” even “a messiah” in the eyes of many Haitians, who had watched the U.S. warships nervously for days. When the last of the warships left, there was a “great sigh of relief” in the town, and Firmin emerged bearing the mantle of a new national hero.65

In fact, though, Firmin’s success was owed largely to his contact with an astute observer of U.S. policy in Washington itself. The Haitian minister to the United States, Hannibal Price—the son of an Englishman and a Haitian woman—was a skilled politician who had cultivated many connections in the capital. He reported that U.S. public opinion would not support aggression against Haiti, and that the Republican Party would likely lose seats in the next election, leaving Harrison and Blaine in a weak position to press the matter. Price concluded that the show of force the U.S. Navy had staged in Port-au-Prince was, in fact, just theater. When Firmin wrote his response to Douglass and Gherardi, he had in hand a telegram from Price that read simply: “The fleet for the purpose of intimidating. Do not yield. Nothing will happen.”66

*   *   *

Firmin was not alone in trying to figure out how to deal with, and contain, the United States. Throughout the Caribbean, particularly in Puerto Rico and Cuba, insurgents and intellectuals were wondering about the same thing. In 1893, Firmin met with the legendary Cuban leader José Martí in Le Cap. The two discussed the struggle for Cuban independence and shared ideas about uniting independent nations in the region into a Caribbean Confederation that could more easily resist incursions from outside. Firmin also traveled widely during the 1890s, posted by the Haitian government as a diplomat in France, England, and Cuba. He was in Paris in 1898 when the United States occupied Cuba and Puerto Rico. Though many nationalists in those countries, struggling for independence from Spain, at first welcomed U.S. support, they were soon dismayed to find that the occupying power had more than simple assistance in mind, and intended to exert control over the political process. Firmin recalled later how Ramón Betances, who had for years fought for Puerto Rican independence, was devastated when he realized that his island had merely traded one empire for another, going from a Spanish colony to an American one. He grew ill and died, with Firmin among those at his bedside. His memory probably haunted Firmin when, years later, he reflected on the dangers that U.S. hegemony might pose to Haiti.67

Though he was often abroad, Firmin kept in close contact with his home country and was invested with the hopes of young thinkers and activists in Haiti. For decades, all of Haiti’s presidents had been officers or generals, usually with their own loyal armies who could be mobilized to fight for them when necessary. Firmin, by contrast, was not a military man—his greatest victory on Haiti’s behalf had been won with his pen, not with guns—and he was admired for his intellectual challenges to European racism. Over the course of the 1890s, he garnered an increasingly vocal following: students, youthful militants, and educated members of the middle class came to constitute what was known as Firminisme, a movement pushing for liberal reform, progress, and democratization.68

In March 1896, Hyppolite—setting out to confront an insurrection in the south of the country—fell from his horse, was struck by a heart attack, and died. Briefly, Firmin became part of the government of his successor, Tiresius Antoine Sam. He resigned from Sam’s staff in 1897, however, apparently because he despaired of being able to root out the corruption that tied government officials to the merchant houses. In addition, the Haitian government seemed increasingly unable to assert its authority when dealing with foreign powers. In 1897, for instance, a German merchant named Emil Lüders was sentenced to a one-year prison term in Haiti after he fought with police who had come to arrest one of his employees. The German kaiser personally intervened in the case, making a series of dramatic demands against the Haitian state. He wanted Haiti not only to release the prisoner but also to remove the judges who had sentenced him, fire the police who arrested him, and pay an indemnity of $5,000 (more than $125,000 in today’s currency) for each day Lüders spent in jail. Haitian President Sam quickly set Lüders free and appealed to U.S. diplomats to help mediate with the Germans regarding their other demands. The United States wasn’t much help, however, and the Germans soon sent two cruisers into the harbor of Port-au-Prince with a simple message: Sam must pay an indemnity of $20,000 or they would bombard the town. Seeing no alternative, Sam acquiesced. The U.S. minister to Haiti, William F. Powell, was disgusted by the affair and by the fact that the United States had not defended Haiti. “This is the first time in my life I have ever had cause to be ashamed of being American,” he wrote. It was, effectively, an international holdup carried out by Germany against Haiti, but no one outside the country publicly complained.69

Sam’s acquiescence, which contrasted sharply with Firmin’s resolute stand against U.S. expansionism, seriously undermined his legitimacy in Haiti. Under pressure, he agreed to step down in May 1902, creating an opening for the activists who wanted to see a change in Haiti’s political structure. Like earlier constitutions, the 1889 constitution stipulated that the elected National Assembly would name the president—a process many saw as a recipe for cronyism and corruption. An uprising in Port-au-Prince calling for direct presidential election led the National Assembly to disperse, and the country burst into political activity, with commissions gathering in the major towns to select organizers for nationwide balloting. It was an echo of 1843, when a new generation had thrown themselves into politics hoping to reform a broken system. Decades earlier, Firmin had belonged to the elitist Liberal Party; but after a few decades of public life, he had come to support a broad expansion of political rights, seeing it as a necessary foundation for reform. On his arrival in Port-au-Prince a few weeks after the end of Sam’s term, he was greeted by several thousand supporters shouting “Long live Firmin!” He was, in fact, probably in a position where he could have easily gathered an army to establish himself as the new president. Some suggested he should, and some later regretted that he hadn’t. But he was committed to gaining power without the use of force.70

Delegates from throughout the country converged on Port-au-Prince to decide how, exactly, the presidential election should be held. The debates were quite intense, and, it seems, haunted: at one point, a framed photograph of the departed President Sam suddenly detached itself from the wall and fell on the head of one of the delegates, Michel Oreste—who would himself serve a brief and ill-fated few months as president a decade later. The delegates settled on an American-style system in which voters throughout the country would select electors who pledged to vote for a certain candidate. All the citizens of Haiti who fulfilled the requirements set out in the constitution—who owned or rented land, practiced a profession, or could prove some kind of employment—were invited to sign up for the elections. Large numbers of people rushed to do so: some twelve thousand soon registered in Port-au-Prince alone. Firmin rapidly emerged as a favorite candidate, especially among young reformers. They even created an impromptu armed guard for him: each night, one of them later recalled, up to fifty “young enthusiasts” of Firmin camped out in the house where he was staying, ready to defend him if necessary. They were enthralled with the “magnetism” of their leader. In Le Cap, one young supporter went so far as to marry Firmin, in a sense: he changed his last name from Paret to Paret-Firmin.71

There were still some notable barriers to political participation, both legal (even the relatively broad suffrage rules excluded some men and all women) and cultural (the Kreyòl-speaking rural population remained on the margins of the political process). Nevertheless, the political mobilization inspired by Firmin represented a significant expansion of democratic participation. Firmin found broad support both in his native Le Cap and in towns throughout the country. Lawyers and teachers were firmly behind him; so was an association of artisans—masons, boat builders, tailors, shoemakers—calling itself the Société des Coeurs Unis. The voter registration offices were flooded with partisans of Firmin eager to take part in the election. It was clear that he had a significant lead over the other candidates.72

The problem for Firmin, however, was that the military structures in the country remained a major part of the political landscape. The officers who served as local governors still had tremendous influence in their districts, and they were concerned that Firmin’s anticorruption initiatives and other political reforms might upend their stable role as power holders. As the campaign progressed, an elderly general named Nord Alexis began to mobilize the military to oppose Firmin. Alexis had been a fixture of political and military life in the north for decades: in 1867, he had led an insurrection against Salnave, and a seventeen-year-old Firmin had been among the armed citizens who repelled one of his attacks on Le Cap. Now the two men came into conflict again.73

Alexis mobilized his followers by declaring that Firmin was an elitist intellectual who would hand Haiti over to the whites. Firmin’s supporters, meanwhile, accused Alexis of trafficking in registration cards and finding other ways to manipulate the election—a weighty charge, since the military commanders in Haitian towns were in charge of overseeing the election process there. These suspicions appear to have been well-founded. In June 1902, for example, Alexis sent a letter to one of the commanders in the north of Haiti. Enclosed in the letter, Alexis wrote, were “the names of some citizens that I have chosen to be elected as deputies” in the commander’s area, and he hoped the commander would “do everything you can to have them elected.” A generous reading of the message might see it as simply an endorsement of certain candidates. It’s pretty clear, however, that Alexis was actually telling the military commander to make sure that these delegates ended up being chosen, legally or not.74

As the election approached, the political tensions boiled over into violence. In Le Cap, soldiers attacked a group of people waiting to register to vote in a neighborhood whose population largely supported Firmin. One man was killed and three seriously injured, while the town police stood by and did nothing. Then, on June 28, the day of the election itself, soldiers supporting Alexis came out in force, occupying the streets in Le Cap and frightening the population away from polling stations. Firmin’s partisans decided to respond in kind, arming themselves and attacking the soldiers. Soon, in Le Cap and other parts of the country, a new civil war was under way.75

Firmin, who had always been committed to using only democratic and constitutional means, now found himself in a role he had always sought to avoid: that of a general. And in a military conflict, Alexis had the upper hand. Firmin was soon forced to flee Le Cap, and his house was looted. Jewels and furniture were taken, the building stripped down to its doorknobs and tiles, and the thing that Firmin probably treasured the most—his library—was ripped apart and scattered.76

Despite Alexis’s efforts, Firmin actually won the majority of the votes in many places, and he garnered a significant majority in the electoral assembly. But once the fighting began, the vote counts no longer mattered. Haiti’s next president would be chosen in the same way that the country’s leaders had so often been determined: on the battlefields. As Alexis gathered his troops in Le Cap and other ports, Firmin blockaded those towns thanks to his control of an impressive warship named the Crête-à-Pierrot, after the fort where Dessalines had famously resisted a siege by the French in 1802. The ship was commanded by Hammerton Killick, one of Firmin’s loyal supporters. In early September 1902, however, after the Crête-à-Pierrot stopped a German ship carrying a large shipment of weapons and ammunition to Le Cap, Alexis called on the German government to help him seize what he called a “pirate ship.” A German warship pursued the Crête-à-Pierrot, and Killick, realizing his ship couldn’t escape, ordered his sailors to evacuate and then blew it up—along with himself—to prevent the vessel from being captured by the enemy. The act was heroic, but it also largely ended Firmin’s campaign. Alexis assumed the presidency in December, and Firmin ended up in exile in St. Thomas, without his books and with many regrets.77

The democratic political movement that Firmin and others had sought to build in Haiti was defeated, the new politics overtaken, once again, by the old. In 1908, after a few years in St. Thomas—and after the publication of his book praising the United States as a model and potential ally for Haiti—Firmin sought support from the United States for another attempt at wresting Haiti’s presidency from Alexis. His requests were rebuffed. In fact, the ship carrying the weapons that Firmin’s partisans were planning to use was intercepted by the United States, and in the end the new pro-Firmin movement was crushed before it got off the ground. Firmin spent the rest of his days in exile and died in St. Thomas in 1911.78

*   *   *

Throughout his life, Firmin had attacked European prejudice and defended his country’s sovereignty from U.S. bullying. He had also thrown himself into several attempts to transform the political system in Haiti. But like an earlier generation of reformers, he was compelled to turn to military force, unable to circumvent the deeply rooted political practices of the country. Instead of bringing about a new political configuration, his efforts became just another piece of the ever-worsening crisis of the Haitian state.

Firmin knew that if Haiti could not end the cycle of political violence, the cost could be quite high. In 1904, the U.S. president had issued what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the long-standing Monroe Doctrine. While reiterating that the United States would not accept European intervention in the Americas, Theodore Roosevelt added that the United States itself might sometimes need to intervene if a country was incapable of guaranteeing its own political stability and was therefore vulnerable to foreign occupation. It was an interesting and cynical twist: the danger of foreign occupation might require foreign occupation. What it meant, worried Firmin, was that if Haiti were to fall prey to a “demeaning and incurable inner sickness” that made it weak and unstable, then “Uncle Sam would reach out his long arms, to prevent us from choosing the hands of another.” A French journalist, Firmin noted, had recently forecast that Haiti would be annexed by the United States. “It is ineluctable and certain,” the journalist had intoned, “that a few hundred thousand half-barbarian individuals, living in a land that could feed several million, have no right to resist its development by people more civilized than they are.” The situation was summed up more ruefully in 1907 by a young Haitian intellectual named Dantès Bellegarde, who quipped—repeating a famous phrase attributed to Mexican president Porfirio Díaz about his own country—that “God is too far, and the United States is too close.”79

Firmin tried to take solace in the idea that any effort to take over Haiti would inevitably fail. “There is no doubt that Haiti is ready to fight, to the last breath of the last citizen, to conserve its independence,” he wrote. The history of the Haitian Revolution was “still there, still very fresh in our memories, nobly inspiring” and even “seductive,” calling out to Haitians to relive it if necessary. Firmin imagined a doctor examining a Haitian confronted with a threat to national independence: he would hear, in his heart, a “fire that suddenly alights to either save everything or destroy everything.” In the face of a common threat from outside, Firmin predicted, all the divisions and individual “egoism” in Haitian society would disappear: “We will resist still, the elderly showing the young how beautiful it is to bury oneself in the ruins of the nation rather than to survive its ruin.” Haitians did not have to succumb to “unenlightened and sickly suspicion” about the designs of foreigners, but rather could feel confident that in the face of any threat, they would always find salvation in their capacity for “heroic fury.”80

In his last days, however, Firmin sounded less certain. All he knew for sure was that, in one way or another, Haiti’s unstable situation would not last. “After my death,” he wrote with a mix of foreboding and hope, “one of two things will happen: either Haiti will fall under foreign control, or it will resolutely adopt the principles in the name of which I have always struggled … No people can live indefinitely under tyranny, injustice, ignorance, and misery.”81