CHAPTER 5

Frederick Douglass, Anténor Firmin, and the Making of U.S.-Haitian Relations

LAURENT DUBOIS

In December 1859, an elaborate official funeral was held in the cathedral of Port-au-Prince, presided over by Haitian President Fabre Geffrard, along with his wife and daughters. As the U.S. Anti-Slavery Reporter explained, the Catholic priest of Port-au-Prince, a Senegalese-born, French-educated man named Abbé Moussa, officiated a High Mass. In the nave of the church was the coffin, draped in black, lit up by candles, decorated with a pen, a sword, and a Bible, and an inscription naming the deceased as a “martyr for the cause of the blacks.” After a rousing eulogy, the coffin was carried to a cross at the edge of town by a large procession that gathered many of the town’s prominent citizens, who wore black armbands. But it was never placed in the ground, for it was empty.¹

The funeral was for abolitionist John Brown, who had been hung days earlier in Virginia. It was probably fitting that Brown’s largest funeral service was held in Haiti, and that the president welcomed him posthumously as a kind of an honorary citizen. John 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. According to an English journalist, it was the example of the 1791 uprising that convinced him that with the right trigger, slaves “would immediately rise all over the Southern States.” According to a recent book by Matthew Clavin, when Brown chose the valley town of Harper’s Ferry, he sought to imitate his Haitian forebears’ military tactics, for he knew they had won against the French by attacking towns and then retreating into inaccessible mountains. And as he awaited his execution after his plan failed, Brown took solace in reading a biography of Toussaint Louverture. After his father’s execution, Brown’s son wrote that if they listened, the slaves of the United States would hear Louverture’s voice speaking to them, “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 announced 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 there from avengers will arise.”²

Brown was not the only abolitionist who admired Haiti. In May of 1861, Frederick Douglass wrote of his desire to visit Haiti. He wanted to see the true country, not the one refracted through the lenses of white racism, to find in “the free, orderly and Independent Republic of Haiti, a refutation of the slanders and disparagements of our race.” Haiti, he wrote, was literally a part of his being, and that of African Americans everywhere. Haiti was “the theatre of so many stirring events and heroic achievements, the work of a people, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh.”³

The outbreak of the Civil War derailed Douglass’s plans to travel to Haiti, and it would take him years to finally visit the country he admired. But the Civil War also created an opening for Haiti’s allies in the United States, who pushed through a bill finally recognizing the country’s independence. Since 1804, even as U.S. merchants flowed in and out of Haiti, its governments had consistently been spurned, or simply ignored, when they requested political recognition. The initial 1806 embargo against trade and diplomatic relations with Haiti was put in place during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency and subsequently maintained by presidents and congressmen who saw any form of reconciliation with Haiti as an invitation to the enslaved to revolt. For generations of leaders in Haiti, this was both a chafing insult and a barrier to the country’s full accession to the rights and privileges of an independent nation. But all attempts to change the policy had foundered in Congress. Secession, however, changed the equation. In 1862, President Lincoln and Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner pushed through a bill that finally recognized Haiti’s independence. The United States was the last country in the world to do so—France had acknowledged Haitian independence, in return for the payment of a hefty indemnity, in 1825. And yet, in the coming decades, the United States would become the country with by the far the most direct and profound impact on Haiti.

“Be convinced, gentlemen,” President Geffrard commanded Haiti’s Congress in 1863, “it is no longer permitted today for any people to isolate itself from other peoples.” Each nation on earth, from “the feeblest” to the “most powerful,” had a “Providential Mission to fulfill among the mutual destinies of humanity.” As president, he succeeded in creating the preconditions for that openness, gaining recognition not only from the United States but from the only other institution that still had not accepted Haitian independence: the Vatican. Now it was up to Haitians themselves to embrace the “tremendous progress” being achieved “throughout the globe,” to open themselves up to trade and exchange with a changing world.⁴

For generations, Haitian elites were convinced—and insisted to their country’s population—that they needed to prove to the world that they truly belonged in order to gain political recognition. Geffrard was finally able to win that recognition. And yet that victory did not put an end to the need for self-justification. Indeed, in a way it almost deepened it, as foreign visitors and governments both criticized and intervened in the country with increasing forcefulness. Recognition opened the way for an increasingly widespread, and influential, presence on the part of foreigners and foreign institutions within Haiti. In the end, it curiously diminished, rather than protected, Haiti’s independence. The denial of sovereignty, it turned out, could take many forms.

* * *

In the sixty years since Haitian independence in 1804, the country’s political, social, and economic life had been shaped by a deep conflict over the meaning of freedom. The Haitian Revolution represented a tremendous victory, over-throwing slavery and empire and establishing an independent nation founded on the self-evident principle that no one should be a slave. But the new nation’s political culture was deeply shaped by the idea that freedom was fragile, and that both old and new enemies might well attempt to reestablish slavery. The refusal of recognition by France and the United States and the widespread racist representations of the country and its revolution were constant reminders of this threat. The question was how to best protect the country and solidify its autonomy. There developed, over time, two different approaches to that problem. Both were products of the Haitian Revolution itself, creations of the remarkable process of social and political transformation and reinvention that began in 1791 and culminated in Haitian independence. But, though born out of the same struggle, the two approaches were in many ways incommensurable. The conflict between them created an enduring stalemate within Haiti.⁵

The first approach, pioneered by Toussaint Louverture and maintained by figures such as Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henry Christophe, and Jean-Pierre Boyer, was to attempt to establish a secure foundation for self-defense by seeking to maintain the plantation economy. Only through the production and sale of plantation commodities, these leaders insisted, could they maintain an army, build forts, and foster alliances with foreign powers that would keep Haiti safe. The most famous symbol of this approach is the Citadel la Ferrière built by Henry Christophe: a vast fortress, visible from miles away, it was meant to withstand a new invasion by the French, and just as much to stand as a forceful symbol of the determination of Haitians to remain free. Some of the stones used to build this fortress were literally carried from old plantations and sugar works from the plain below by former slaves rounded up to do the work under conditions many contemporaries described as brutal, and even a new kind of slavery.

The second approach was the creation and maintenance of what Haitian sociologist Jean Casimir has dubbed the “counter-plantation” system. It was built by the ex-slaves, mostly African born, who were at the center of the military struggles of the revolution, but who more broadly made use of the interstices opened up by the conflict to craft a new way of life on the plantations where they had once been slaves. The system—one that of course has parallels in all other post-emancipation societies in the Americas—was based not simply on dismantling the plantation, but on setting up structures organized to avoid its return—in any form. From the perspective of this majority, a plantation was still a plantation—whether its profits were meant to fend off the French or not. Practitioners of this system turned their backs on the plantation-based projects of their early political leaders, taking control of the land and putting it to their own uses. The counter-plantation system was, perhaps, the most radical production of the Haitian Revolution, since it was based on the insistence that only through a complete transformation of the social and economic order itself could real freedom actually be attained. Those who supported it refused the idea—one explicitly advanced by state leaders—that they had to accept serious limits on their liberty in order to preserve it. They built their own kind of citadel through a set of social institutions rooted in individual land ownership and anchored in a set of broader family and community institutions.

On that land, they did all the things that had been denied to them under slavery: they built families, freely practiced their religion, and worked for themselves. They grew food for themselves and for local and regional markets, but they also found that coffee, once a plantation crop, could be successfully grown on small family farms and bring in money that could be used to buy other goods from the towns. That combination guaranteed rural Haitians a better life, materially and socially, than that available to most other people of African descent in the Americas throughout the early nineteenth century. Over time, despite opposition from certain leaders and the institution of laws meant to save the plantation, rural Haiti was largely transformed into a space divided into small land-holdings, a space of striking social and political autonomy. And, despite many attempts—including those made during the twenty-year U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934)—efforts to rebuild plantations in Haiti largely met with failure. The relative success of this system can perhaps be summarized by one crucial fact: during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, few people left Haiti. The country was, instead, a significant magnet for immigration: people came from as close as other parts the Caribbean, including Guadeloupe and Martinique, and from as far as Europe and the Middle East. Thousands of African Americans made the journey to Haiti as well, in the 1820s and early 1860s. Many of these migrants became part of Haiti’s rural communities.

The success of the counter-plantation system in the countryside, however, created a stark problem for the country’s elites. They were unable to secure power and profit as large-scale land-holders overseeing plantation production. The state, meanwhile, despite attempts to control the rural population through draconian laws such as Boyer’s Code Rural, in fact exercised very tenuous power in much of the country. What governing elites were able to control, however, were the port towns: the outlets through which coffee and other products—notably dyewood—harvested by the rural population had to pass on their way to foreign markets. Over the course of the early nineteenth century, the main route to social and economic advancement was the import-export trade. Success in this area depended on ties with foreign merchants, often German, who came to settle in Haiti eager to take advantage of commercial opportunities. The state, meanwhile, largely abandoned attempts to tax individual revenues, and instead focused on heavily taxing coffee and other goods, thus profiting from rural production without needing to directly control it.

What developed, then, was an enduring stalemate between the counter-plantation system, rooted in the countryside, and a network of economic institutions within the port towns, including regional elite and government structures. The state was quite weak, with its army divided into regional poles of power. Haitian writer and geographer Georges Anglade describes nineteenth-century Haiti as a confederation of eleven regions, each with its own port town. The political situation alternated between periods of stability under authoritarian leaders and bursts of instability during which generals from different regions, vying for power, raised armies to take over the central government in Port-au-Prince. But the chronology of shifting government regimes somewhat obscures a deeper stability: the conflicts within the elite seem to have had a relatively limited impact on the rural majority in much of the country, which was organized around and governed through a set of largely independent institutions and economic networks. The weakness of the state seems to have suited many in the countryside: between a strong state committed to some form of plantation model and a state that was weak and largely absent from their lives, the latter was preferable.

By the 1860s and 1870s, a new generation of political activists and leaders attempted to change this configuration. The more radical among them looked back to earlier attempts at political reform, especially the revolutions of the 1840s, and insisted that Haiti needed a more democratic system. For the most part, however, they also remained convinced that Haiti’s rural culture was unsustainable, and an obstacle to their country’s progress. Many were anxious that in a changing world and in the face of rising U.S. power, Haiti would simply be overwhelmed if it did not reform and modernize itself. Haitian leaders, however, also facilitated increasing foreign control and intervention in their country: both governments and rebels wanting to take power reached out to the United States, England, and Germany, seeking weapons and direct military support. At one point in the 1865, for instance, the government in Port-au-Prince secured support from the British navy in a bid to suppress a rebel army based in Le Cap, in the north of the country. A ship called the Bulldog bombarded Le Cap, reducing a fort and several buildings to rubble.

Watching from the shore that day was a teenager named Anténor Firmin, who in time would become one of Haiti’s greatest intellectuals and statesmen. He was of modest background, the son of tailors, and a brilliant student. He distinguished himself a few years later by helping to lead an impromptu militia in defending the city from an incursion by a rebel group. By the 1870s, he was working as a lawyer and was admired for his eloquence in court. He also edited a major newspaper, Le Messager du Nord and became a key intellectual figure in the powerful Liberal Party, jousting with the opposing National Party. Throughout the final decades of the nineteenth century, these two parties battled for political power in Haiti. The National Party’s activists demanded a more democratic system, clamoring to place more control of the country’s institutions in the hands of the majority of its people. The countervailing slogan of the Liberals was “Government by the Most Competent,” and was, in the evaluation of one historian, “frankly elitist and anti-populist in its implications.” One of the Liberal Party’s leaders and theorists argued in 1861 that Haiti was not ready for democracy: “The supremacy of numbers assures the supremacy of ignorance.” What it needed to escape its dependency on foreign nations was a generation of “engineers, builders, industrialists, science teachers”—and fewer poets. Many of its members argued that it was the lightskinned members of Haiti’s society that had the education and capacity necessary to confront Haiti’s challenges and develop its economy. But the party attracted a few prominent black members, including Anténor Firmin. One of the most controversial topics of debate at the time concerned Haiti’s longstanding constitutional ban on property ownership by foreign whites. While many saw this as a vital mechanism for defending Haiti’s sovereignty, others—including Firmin—came to see it as a barrier to economic development.⁶

In the 1880s, Firmin left Haiti to study in Paris. There, he participated in a salon organized by the Puerto Rican nationalist Ramón Emeterio Betances, where various thinkers from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean gathered, talked, and plotted. Firmin was also invited to join the Anthropological Society of Paris. But though he had some welcoming allies, along with one other Haitian colleague in the society, Firmin found himself largely in hostile territory. The ideas of the Comte de Gobineau, who penned his famous Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races in the 1850s, were still popular. While Firmin did not openly confront the dominant racial ideas of anthropology at the society, the experience of being part of its discussions left him in a quiet fury. He was, he later admitted, in a “depressive mood” while in Paris. He responded in print, writing an impassioned refutation of the dominant racial theories of the day.⁷

Called The Equality of the Human Races, Firmin’s work skewered the European intellectuals, some famous and others less so, who had lined up behind spurious theories of racial difference. In one short chapter called “Prejudices and Vanities,” he simply listed racist comments by “men who are generally considered authoritative voices in science and philosophy,” from Immanuel Kant to Ernest Renan. “The notion of the inequality of the human races is so deeply rooted in the minds of the most enlightened men of Europe that they seem incapable of ever discarding it.” That, he argued, was not because it was reasonable or logical, but because of the history of slavery and colonialism had produced, shaped, and ultimately naturalized these ideas.⁸

Firmin insisted that there was only one human race and that in order to be a truly “positivist science,” anthropology must free itself from the thrall of untenable racist theories based on scattered anecdotal evidence, and devote itself to what should be its true 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 in order to unwind the theories that buttressed ideas of racial inequality. It argued that, among all the contemporary civilizations of the world, the United States was destined to become the richest and most powerful. But for Firmin, Haiti presented perhaps the most powerful refutation of racist ideas. Its writers had produced brilliant poetry and essays, he emphasized. He even listed some particularly good-looking Haitian men in order to refute the idea that whites were inherently more beautiful. He remembered seeing in 1883, among the aides-de-camp of a Haitian general, “a young Black man so mesmerizingly handsome that one could not take one’s eyes of his face. I have never seen him again and I still do not know his name.” He described how another “handsome specimen of the Black race” was a man who directed 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.” Through such perhaps playful passages, Firmin was making a serious point. For each supposed “scientific observation” deployed to justify racist theories, Firmin could provide an opposite observation. While his were based on his personal experience as a Haitian, those of the supposed “scientists” on the other side were just as personal, based on the racial trap they were caught in as European observers.⁹

Though largely ignored by the dominant strands of European anthropology, Firmin’s powerful attack on European racism gained him many admirers and established him as one of the country’s most revered intellectuals. When he returned home in the late 1880s, that profile helped him emerge as an increasingly influential political figure in the country. And once back in Haiti, he paid particular attention to the question that increasingly preoccupied the Haitian elite: What was to be done about the rising power of the United States?

* * *

With the rise of the steamship in the decades after the Civil War, the United States turned its attention to the Caribbean in a search for adequate coaling stations. Because they were independent, the Dominican Republic and neighboring Haiti provided the greatest opportunity for U.S. designs. Before the Civil War, some Southerners had explored the idea of annexing certain Caribbean territories as a way to expand slavery. In the 1870s, however, the push for annexation came from rather different quarters. President Ulysses S. Grant avidly pursued a project to annex the Dominican Republic. And, perhaps surprisingly, he found an ally in Frederick Douglass. Though Douglass had vociferously attacked plans for Caribbean annexation before the Civil War, he now saw things differently. Like Grant, he of course understood the strategic motivations for the interest in the region. “Almost every great maritime nation,” he noted, “has some footing and foothold in the Caribbean sea but our own.” But Douglass also saw annexation as a way of spreading the progressive values of post–Civil War U.S. society and of helping to bring prosperity to the Caribbean. “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.” Douglass was part of a commission that traveled to the Dominican Republic to explore possibilities for annexation, and he lectured on behalf of the idea in the United States.¹⁰

Grant’s attempts at annexation foundered on opposition in the United States. But Haitians of Anténor Firmin’s generation watched all these developments closely, and with increasing anxiety. Many Haitians were both unimpressed by and suspicious of their neighbors to the north. One journalist described the United States as hungrily watching his country “with eyes lit up with desire.” Intellectuals saw the United States as a hopelessly materialistic, uncouth, even backward country, not to mention a deeply racist one—a place driven, as one wrote, by “materialism without humanism.” In 1873 the prominent politician Demesvar Delorme urged his compatriots to turn their backs on the United States and to focus instead on the common culture and language they shared with France. Traveling by train in France in 1892, a Haitian man had the misfortune of sitting next to an obnoxiously talkative tourist from the United States. The experience pained him so much that he wrote a passionate lament about the rising power of Haiti’s neighbor. “You are good at making machines,” he complained, “but have a hard time coming up with ideas.”¹¹

There were, however, those who took a very different few. They saw the United States as a potential source for economic development, arguing that the nation would be a much more useful partner than France had ever been for the country. One Haitian politician declared in 1883 that ultimately the Haitian elite, though it remained tightly connected to France, would realize that a “marriage of love” with France was simply impossible. Spurned, they would have no choice but to join in “a marriage of convenience” with the United States.¹²

Firmin was among those who believed the United States could, under the right circumstances, help Haiti to develop and modernize. In 1888, he joined an uprising led by Florville Hyppolite against the central government in Portau-Prince. Firmin took on the task of negotiating with the United States for political and military support. In order to secure that backing, Firmin raised the possibility that if Hyppolite took power, he would give concessions to the United States—including access to a coaling station, perhaps at a long-coveted port at the Môle Saint-Nicolas, in the northwest of Haiti. The insurrection ultimately triumphed—in part thanks to a series of arms shipments from a prominent U.S. merchant named William Clyde, who supplied Gatling guns—and Firmin became the minister of foreign relations of Haiti.

* * *

In his inaugural address in 1890, U.S. President Benjamin Harrison declared that “the necessities of our navy require convenient coaling stations and dock and harbor privileges.” The navy ordered one of its admirals, Bancroft Gherardhi, to gather “full and detailed description of all coaling stations in the West Indies.” One of the most sought-after locations was the Port of the Môle Saint-Nicolas in Haiti. Gherardhi concluded that the Môle would be “invaluable,” and that if the United States approached the Haitians with the right mixture of firmness and strategy, it could be acquired for the navy with little difficulty.

When Harrison chose a new minister to Haiti, he carefully considered who might be most able to successfully negotiate with the Black Republic. He found the perfect person in Frederick Douglass, who had endorsed him during the campaign. Stephen Preston, Haiti’s ambassador in Washington, rejoiced when he heard the news, calling it a “miracle.” He effused that, “for the moment” at least, the danger “of attempts to annex a part of our territory” had passed. Secretary of State Blaine wrote to Douglass himself that his diplomatic mission to Haiti “would be the most potent we could send hither for the peace, welfare, and prosperity of that warring and dissatisfied people.”¹³ It had taken nearly thirty years, but Douglass would finally be able to spend time in the land he admired. He did so, however, in a very different context from either 1861 or the 1870s. 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. As he arrived in Haiti, Douglass found himself in a curious and ultimately uncomfortable position, both somewhat distrusted by some in the U.S. government and somewhat distrusting himself of the true intentions of the government he served.¹⁴

Having promulgated the new constitution, Hyppolite and Firmin quickly turned to the pressing question of how to deal with the United States. In his first meeting with the Haitian president, Douglass 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 declared, were not a “menace to the autonomy of nations.” President Hyppolite was a little skeptical: in his reply, he agreed that there was nothing wrong with international exchange, but added that “each nation has the right to be proud of its autonomy.”¹⁵

Sympathetic to and knowledgeable about Haitian history, Douglass was well aware that Haitians were rightly sensitive about the threat of external pressures and forces. He warned Secretary of State Blaine that it did not go over well when a U.S. Navy ship was sent to do a survey of 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.”¹⁶

Douglass left Haiti for much of 1890, and returned at the end of the year with official instructions to begin negotiations for the Môle. On New Year’s Day of 1891, he called on Firmin. It was a remarkable meeting of the minds: the two men, though of different generations, were major intellectual figures who had struggled to defeat racism throughout their lives. Firmin, however, only had time to express his worries about the intentions of the United States. Douglass 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.”¹⁷

Already, however, Douglass was getting a reputation back home for being a bit too sensitive to the perspective of the Haitians. One of his strongest critics was the U.S. entrepreneur William Clyde, the owner of the West India steamship line, who had supplied weapons to Hyppolite in 1889. Clyde had sought a monopoly over steamship transportation in Haiti, and when he realized the deal had fallen through, he demanded that the Haitian government pay him for “time and money” he had spent in the 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 I was,” Douglass wrote, “more a Haïtien than an American.”¹⁸

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 writer argued, the United States needed a white diplomatic representative, “for the people here 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.” “Prejudice sets all logic at defiance,” Douglass later wrote about such claims. “Haïti is no stranger to Americans or to American prejudice,” and the country 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.” “The American people are too great to be small,” he declared hopefully, and should treat Haiti with respect and justice. If, instead, the United States planned on preying on the weaknesses and fears of Haiti, or of acquiring things 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 Haïti,” Douglass declared. “I am not ashamed of that charge.”¹⁹

But the attacks against Douglass worked. Though Secretary of State Blaine realized he could not get rid of Douglass without inciting an outcry in both Haiti and the United States, he also concluded he could not trust him to get the Môle. So he sent Admiral Gherardhi to Haiti, who took over the negotiations with the Haitian government. Looking back bitterly on the experience, Douglass claimed that the overweening attitude of Gherardi had the opposite of the intended effect, undermining his government’s chances of getting what it wanted. In the face of Firmin’s hesitation about ceding the Môle to the United States, Gherardi responded with veiled threats, declaring ominously that if his request were refused, the United States would have to force Haiti into assuming its “moral obligation.” He told Firmin that “it was the destiny of the Môle to belong to the United States.” Douglass attempted to be more conciliatory, arguing that the concession would be “consistent with the autonomy of Haïti” and a “source of strength rather than weakness.” “National isolation,” Douglass insisted was a “policy of the past,” and Haitian rulers should act “to touch the world at all points that make for civilization and commerce.”²⁰

Firmin agreed with Douglass about these broader points. But he also understood Haitian politics, and the particular bind his government was in, enough to realize that it was essentially impossible to accede to the U.S. request. He told Gherardi and Douglass as much in their first discussion. He admitted that “if some one must have” the Môle, it should be the United States, but 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. government. In April 1891, Gherardi and Douglass once again went to see Firmin to press him on the issue. This time, they had back-up: the U.S. Navy sent four warships into the harbor of Port-au-Prince, adding to the three warships already stationed there. The population of the town was, of course, worried by the display of force, and Firmin, under pressure, promised a final response to the request. But to the surprise of the U.S. envoys, it was a polite but firm “No.”²¹

Firmin agreed that, in principle, the cession of Môle Saint-Nicolas could easily have been arranged to the benefit of both countries. The problem, however, was the way the United States had approached the matter. President Harrison and Secretary Blaine had asked that, in addition to giving access to the Môle, the Haitian government promise not to rent or grant any “special privilege or usage rights” to any part of its territory to any other government. For Firmin, this was too much. To accept this condition would, he wrote, 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.” The other problem was that the United States was being a bully. The fact that it had sent warships to Port-au-Prince in a clear effort to threaten Haiti made it impossible for the government to accept the U.S. request, he explained. If Haiti did so, it would “seem to cede to foreign pressure and therefore, ipso facto, to compromise our existence as an independent people.” Firmin ended his refusal by insisting that the refusal was not an act of “ill will” on Haiti’s part, and that his country remained attached to “the most glorious and the most generous Republic of the New World and perhaps of the modern World.”²²

Firmin was clearly proud of his refusal: 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 the United States. “Firmin’s pen,” notes one historian, had “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 several days. When the last of them left, there was a “great sigh of relief” in the town. Firmin emerged bearing the mantle of a new national hero.²³

In fact, though, if Firmin succeeded, it was largely because he had an astute observer of U.S. policy in Washington itself. The Haitian minister to the United States, Hannibal Price—the son of an English man and a Haitian woman—was a skilled politician who had cultivated many connections in the capital. He concluded that U.S. public opinion would not support aggression against Haiti, and that the Republican Party would likely lose seats in the next election, and so Harrison and Blaine would be in a weak position to press the matter. Based on this analysis, he felt sure that the show of force the navy planned for Port-au-Prince was, in fact, just theater. When Firmin wrote his response to Douglass and Gerardhi, he had in hand a telegraph from Price that read simply: “The fleet for the purpose of intimidating. Do not yield. Nothing will happen.”²⁴

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“Will Haiti work?” an anxious Anténor Firmin wondered in 1905. In exile in St. Thomas, he was far from his home in Le Cap and, perhaps most painfully, without his library. He had spent fifteen years of public life in Haiti, which culminated in a failed bid for the presidency, his successful mobilization of supportive citizens in the towns having proved no match for the entrenched machinery of the Haitian military. In the wake of this political defeat, unable to return home, he tried to analyze Haiti’s past and find a way forward. What he ultimately produced was a remarkable work of comparative history analyzing the parallel development of the United States and Haiti. Published as a kind of long letter to President Theodore Roosevelt, it was also very much a warning issued to his countrymen in Haiti. The United States was now the most powerful political force in the region, he declared, and Haiti had to find a productive way to deal with it. He dismissed those who believed the United States was simply a threat to Haitian sovereignty. “The intelligent Haitian,” he wrote, “rather than getting caught up in an irrational suspicion,” 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.” The United States would remain true to its founding principles, which disposed them to respect the independence of other countries. “Americans,” Firmin wrote, “respect forms where Europeans flaunt them with cavalier ease.” Anyway, he added, the United States did not need Haiti. Of all the great “occidental powers,” the United States had the lowest population density—less than ten people per kilometer—and therefore the least need for colonies.²⁵

The key for Haiti was to figure out how to thrive under the “colossal shadow” cast by the United States. His country “must grow, develop, without ever letting itself be absorbed.” While Haiti’s “smiling concessions” to other “rich and civilized countries” had been a “pure loss,” the United States could become Haiti’s salvation by providing “everything we need” to become “an active and laborious civilization.” “They have capital of all kinds: 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.”²⁶

The United States could also, for Firmin, be an institutional example for Haiti. The alternation of parties in power in the United States, he noted, guaranteed political stability. He effused that the United States was a place where people put the national good over individual ambitions, and combined liberty and equality to their greatest effect. He even downplayed the continuing racial discrimination in the country. He celebrated Lincoln, and while he admitted that the question of the rights of African Americans still had to be resolved, he noted passingly—and with a rather nonchalant long-term view—that within a century, the problem would be resolved with “justice.” He went further, asserting that the United States actually provided a model of racial egalitarianism for Haiti, which he declared was weakened by its own form of color prejudice between mulattoes and blacks.²⁷

As he watched the rising United States, Firmin did what some Haitian revolutionaries had done in their relationship to France a century earlier. He sought to conjure up the best of imperial powers, the one whose devotion to principles of democracy and equal rights would make it an ally in Haitian’s own struggles. For all its optimism, though, Firmin’s analysis also had an ominous undercurrent: under such a powerful shadow, Haitians urgently had to solve their own problems. Otherwise they would be inviting disaster, opening the way for the destruction of their precious sovereignty. The power of the United States, its “almost undisputed preponderance” in the hemisphere, was inescapable. “Whether we rejoice or mourn,” he declared, Haiti had to “to accept it and act accordingly.” “Instead of putting ourselves in the position of trying to block an impetuous and irresistible torrent,” Haiti had to go with the flow, trying to put itself in a position to be “productively watered” by the torrent 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.”²⁸

Firmin ended his life watching events in his homeland, from afar, with a deep anxiety. Just before his death in 1911, he lamented that he was likely to “disappear” without even seeing a glimpse of a “new dawn” for Haiti. “After my death,” he wrote with a note of warning to his countrymen, “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 it has always struggled and fought.” “For in the twentieth century in the Western hemisphere,” he concluded with a mix of hope and foreboding, “no people can live indefinitely under tyranny, injustice, ignorance and misery.”²⁹

Firmin’s worst fears ultimately came to pass. Accelerating political conflict during the years after his death created an opening for the United States, which for both strategic and economic reasons occupied Haiti in 1915. The occupiers remained until 1934, transforming the country in profound ways and spurring on a new set of political and intellectual movements that would shape the country’s twentieth century. But Firmin’s insights into the challenges of Haiti, as well as its promise, remain as relevant today as ever.