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The Roots of Early Black Nationalism: Northern African Americans' Invocations of Haiti in the Early Nineteenth Century

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The Roots of Early Black Nationalism: Northern African Americans' Invocations of Haiti in the Early Nineteenth Century Slavery & Abolition ISSN: 0144-039X (Print) 1743-9523 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsla20 The Roots of Early Black Nationalism: Northern African Americans' Invocations of Haiti in the Early Nineteenth Century Sara C. Fanning To cite this article: Sara C. Fanning (2007) The Roots of Early Black Nationalism: Northern African Americans' Invocations of Haiti in the Early Nineteenth Century, Slavery & Abolition, 28:1, 61-85, DOI: 10.1080/01440390701269780 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01440390701269780 Published online: 21 May 2007. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 293 View related articles Citing articles: 5 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fsla20 Download by: [University of Texas Libraries] Date: 05 May 2017, At: 17:14 Slavery and Abolition Vol. 28, No. 1, April 2007, pp. 61–85 The Roots of Early Black Nationalism: Northern African Americans’ Invocations of Haiti in the Early Nineteenth Century Sara C. Fanning This article argues that Haiti played a far greater role in the cultural and political activi- ties of northern free blacks than historians previously credited. The evolving political, economic and social makeup of Haiti during its first three decades of independence spurred African-American interest in the island-nation. Relying on American newspaper reports, sailors’ accounts, messages from the state of Haiti, and where possible, African- American voices, this work demonstrates the emigration of the 1820s was not the first wave of African-American interest in the black republic but the culmination of decades of interaction and exposure to the Haitian black nationalist project. The standard version of the genesis of American black nationalism rests on the white American Colonization Society’s (ACS) aggressive efforts from 1817 onwards to send African Americans to Africa. Many historians argue this exclusionary action pushed northern free blacks from identifying with Africa to identifying with the United States, because they realized a connection with America when confronted with de facto deportation.1 Certainly, the northern black community began replacing the for- merly prevalent ‘African’2 moniker with ‘colored’ or ‘black’ in the wake of the ACS’s efforts in the late 1810s.3 This position, however, assumes that the embrace of America was an offshoot of the rejection of Africa, thereby missing another cultural and political force at work at this early stage in the black-nationalist movement’s for- mation – namely, Haiti.4 Between 6,000 and 13,000 African Americans from throughout the northeastern United States migrated to Haiti in the 1820s, the largest migration of African Amer- icans up to this point in time.5 Haiti had long appealed to northern free blacks as Sara Fanning is a Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin. Correspondence to: Sara C. Fanning, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station, B700, Austin, TX 78712-0220, USA. Email: [email protected] ISSN 0144-039X print/1743-9523 online/07/010061–25 DOI: 10.1080/01440390701269780 # 2007 Taylor & Francis 62 Sara C. Fanning an independent nation that espoused republican values of citizenship, equality and liberty; sought respect on the world stage; celebrated the blackness of its citizens; and publicly avowed black racial pride. The nation actively courted American free blacks, offering universal education, economic advancement, suffrage, religious freedom, and a society with a republican ideology. Black Americans’ identification with the free Republic of Haiti at the turn of the nine- teenth century is obvious from demonstrations, speeches, parades, in the naming of institutions and, ultimately, in the mass emigration movement to the island. Popular references to the Haitian Revolution reveal a consciousness of the island-nation’s affairs from its inception.6 These invocations suggest the deep links between Haiti and the black-nationalist project which embraced a black nation state rather than a return to Africa.7 Haiti, in many ways, was the black nation underpinning early American ideas of black nationalism.8 For African Americans, Haiti was a model of black military power, a defender of racial rights, and a land that opened its arms to them. Much of the scholarly research on the intersection of Haiti and American blacks at this time looks from the Caribbean to the United States, rather than vice versa. One approach has been to trace influences of the Haitian Revolution on American slaves at this time.9 Scholars have linked the major slave rebellions of the era to the events in the Caribbean: Ponte Coupee Conspiracy (1795), Gabriel’s Conspiracy (1800), Charles Deslondes Revolt (1811), the Denmark Vesey Conspiracy, (1822) and Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831) have all been sounded out for echoes of the Black Jacobins.10 Historians have demonstrated how news carried by refugees fleeing the revolution and sailors engaged in the carrying trade between the island and the United States found its way to slave populations along the eastern seaboard.11 Eugene Genovese argues that by abolishing slavery and overthrowing the French army in a violent and protracted war from 1791 to 1804, the Haitian Revolution created a new era in which slaves ‘increasingly aimed not at secession from the domi- nant society but at joining in on equal terms’.12 The republican ideas brought forth and articulated – of equality and liberty for all – revolutionized the possibilities of life after freedom for slaves and for descendants of Africa throughout the world.13 I would extend this argument: when they fought for and won freedom from slavery, Haitians directly challenged ideas of white military supremacy and the notion that freed slaves and free people of color were incapable of sustaining independence. They changed the possibilities not only for militant slaves, as Genovese has posited, but for politicized free blacks.14 This propensity to focus on the antislavery legacy of the Haitian Revolution and its significance to the slave system has caused historians to overlook another group of des- cendants of Africa in the Americas – the growing free black population of the United States. The final chapter of the revolution, Haitian nationhood, was a radical precedent for this group, too. For free blacks, the establishment and progress of Haiti as an inde- pendent black nation marked a political and cultural milestone, just as the Haitian Revolution did for rebelling American slaves. Formerly, the only available form of advancement, or route to power, was secession from the western world of independent Slavery and Abolition 63 nation states and return to ‘primitive’ Africa; Haiti represented a chance to compete in the same hemisphere as the western nations on an equal footing.15 Recently, historians have dismissed Haiti’s influence in the northern African- American community’s social and cultural development.16 Haiti, they argue, had little to offer the project of black advancement because the revolution was too grotesquely violent a legacy for northern African Americans to embrace in political agitation against slavery. But for northern African Americans who were already free or in the process of negotiating their manumission, the Haitian Revolution went beyond the aegis of abolitionism. Many free black northerners observed the island republic with a sense of pride in its accomplishments, using the island as a rallying cry in their own increasingly separatist causes. Some even finally joined the Haitians in the 1820s, seeking to bring the project of black nationalism to its full realization – a black nation state for all descendants of Africa. In the United States, northern African Americans faced a society that was unprepared to respect their rights once free. Many northern free blacks subscribed to American republican sensibilities but were faced with a society retreating from its own revolutionary promises. This retreat took place throughout northern cities during the first decade of the 1800s, characterized by open hostility towards free blacks evident in street violence, the loss of suffrage rights, and the enactment of laws to curb freedom of movement.17 In Pennsylvania from 1805 to 1814, state legis- latures repeatedly attempted to pass laws restricting free blacks from traveling into the state, proposed all free blacks be required to register freedom certificates, and even discussed auctioning free blacks convicted of crimes as slaves in order to give ‘compen- sation [to] the people they may have plundered’.18 Although these proposals never passed into law, the African-American community felt the rising tide of racial persecution acutely. Both as a response to the rising racism and the violence that accompanied it, African Americans of this period gravitated toward exclusive community institutions such as schools, churches and Masonic lodges. These institutions sprang up throughout the northern and mid-Atlantic port cities of Philadelphia, Boston, Newport, New Haven, New York and Baltimore. As people withdrew into black communities, they refused to be passive victims of the developing racial language but chose to embrace the language of color and increasingly defined themselves by the color of their skin. By designating themselves by the color of their skin, they hoped to unify against white oppression and racism.19 This emerging black identity was not based on an essentialist or biological notion of difference but was characterized by shared political and cultural goals – autonomy, independence, and freedom of movement unrestrained by a white majority.20 Some African Americans believed these goals could only be fulfilled through the establish- ment of a black-ruled dominion. As Haiti increasingly identified and advertised itself as a home for displaced African people and a refuge from racial prejudice, African Americans took notice. Newspapers were a major source of information for the African-American commu- nity and they were filled with reports about Haiti and Haitian leaders.
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