The nineteenth century wants a Black Nationality because it is an instrumentality that cannot be dispensed with in the re-habilitation of the black race. […]
If then, we can carve out a separate existence here, either under the American flag, or over it, be it so. But if we cannot, then migration is our only policy, and most sacred duty.
— “Wanted! A Nation!,” Weekly Anglo-African, May 11, 1861

1Because slavery was neither morally justifiable nor acceptable in a young nation built on ideals of liberty and equality, the United States seriously considered emancipating its slaves in the late eighteenth century. Physical separation, however, quickly appeared as the inevitable corollary to emancipation. The “peculiar solution”—the idea of “deporting” or “transporting” blacks to foreign territories—was rapidly translated into concrete facts with the creation of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816.1

2Although some prominent African American leaders were firmly opposed to emigration and openly denounced the ACS and its scheme to colonize free and emancipated blacks in Africa, others advocated relocation to other, closer places such as Upper Canada, which was deemed more “civilized” and thus more acceptable than Africa. While advocates of the emigration solution agreed that blacks should leave the United States, there was no consensus concerning the place where they should settle. Still, one location did seem more attractive than others in the first half of the nineteenth century: Haiti.

3The first serious emigration scheme to Haiti was devised in the early 1820s, during the term of office of Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer. It had some success—several thousand blacks emigrated—but was rapidly halted for a number of reasons which will be detailed in this essay. Although black emigrationists in the 1830s and 1840s generally contemplated relocating to Canada or the British West Indies, where slavery was abolished in 1833,2 emigration to Haiti never completely disappeared as an option. Black activists showed a renewed interest in Haiti in the early 1850s, which climaxed with a second wave of emigration between 1859 and 1862. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 and the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 prompted many free African Americans to leave the United States. One of them, the Reverend James Theodore Holly, felt that Haiti was the one place where the black race could “regenerate” and fulfill its own destiny; in the mid- 1850s, he encouraged his brothers and sisters to move to the black republic. Both the national US context and the relatively peaceful political situation in Haiti contributed to this new wave of emigration, which also fortuitously coincided with another emigration project from the Haitian government.

4In this essay I examine the circumstances of these two voluntary emigration movements to Haiti—the first “black republic” and therefore the ideal place for African Americans to start anew. I also emphasize the involvement of African Americans themselves in the emigration movement. Historiography on the subject remains minimal because historians have mostly focused on those blacks who were determined to remain in the United States; they have often described the emigration movement as having been essentially forced by whites upon blacks.3 In foregrounding black efforts to encourage emigration, I also hope to reveal the diversity that characterized black antislavery thought in the antebellum era.

The emergence of “colonization” and the growing interest for Haiti as a place of settlement for free and emancipated blacks

5As Patrick Rael and other historians have emphasized, the abolition of slavery in the United States “took place in two general waves.”4 The first wave, which was triggered by the American Revolution, saw the emancipation of almost all African Americans in the North: Vermont banned slavery in its state constitution in 1777; Pennsylvania was the first state to pass a gradual emancipation law in 1780 (Rhode Island and Connecticut did so a few years later); a judicial decision brought slavery to an end in Massachusetts in 1783. For many white observers, however, coexistence between whites and free (d) blacks was not an option. They soon contemplated the idea of transporting or “colonizing” free and emancipated blacks to foreign lands, particularly to Africa, where they would serve as a colonial relay between civilization and savagery, bringing the fruits of civilization to a barbaric people.5 While critical of slavery, “colonizationists,” as they came to be called, regarded blacks as inferior to them, unable to assimilate into white American society, and likely to become a public charge. Their conviction grew stronger with the emergence of a pseudoscience of race in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The proximity of Saint-Domingue (which became Haiti in 1804) also aroused fears of revolutionary contagion, as confirmed by the growing number of slave rebellions in the South at this time (Gabriel’s rebellion in 1800 is the most famous example). Consequently, the colonization movement flourished in the late 1790s and early 1800s in the Northern states as well as in Virginia. A number of concrete proposals for the settlement of blacks outside the United States were discussed: two Virginians, Ferdinando Fairfax ( “Plan for Liberating the Negroes within the United States,” 1790) and St. George Tucker (A Dissertation on Slavery, 1796), proposed plans for gradual emancipation that entailed the subsequent deportation of blacks. While some white antislavery men saw colonization as a logical result of emancipation, others, including politicians, saw it as a way to protect economic interests and to ensure civil peace. Some even imagined that it would be a way to solve the race issue brought up by the fact of living side by side with free blacks.

6Other than the American West, Sierra Leone or Africa more generally, Haiti was considered as a possible place of settlement for free and emancipated blacks.6 The climate, which was said to be similar to that of Africa, was a major argument. As early as 1801, Thomas Jefferson argued that the Caribbean area had the double advantage of being “[i]nhabited already by a people of their own race and color” and of offering “climates congenial with their natural constitution,” not to mention the fact that blacks would be isolated from other “descriptions of men”—whites.7 But supporters of Haiti were clearly in the minority in the early nineteenth century. Since the Haitian Revolution, the proslavery South had been more than suspicious of the new black republic. Not a single week would pass without the Revolution being brought up in Southern newspapers.8 Because of their geographical location, Southern states harbored many refugees from Haiti who were often accompanied by their slaves; some states actually passed legislation that prevented their entry.9 In this volatile context, rumors of insurrection flourished. In the (white) American collective imagination, Haiti was then associated with rebellion rather than being considered as a possible site for relocation.10

7The story was different from an African American point of view. Since the beginning of the Haitian Revolution, the island had enjoyed an unparalleled reputation in the eyes of black people. Soon after the proclamation of Haiti’s independence in January 1804, many African American activists started lecturing and writing pamphlets or books on Haiti, its revolution, and its world-famous leader Toussaint Louverture. The most influential black abolitionists—David Walker, Frederick Douglass, William Watkins, Alexander Crummell, Henry Highland Garnet, Martin Delany—all evoked the Haitian Revolution as proof of the political agency of blacks. While some did not approve of the violence used by Haitians to get rid of their oppressors, they praised their revolutionary spirit and set up Louverture as a “hero” of the black race.11 In the words of Leon Pamphile, “the Haitian Revolution proved to be a catalyst for raising African Americans’ self-esteem.”12 The impossibility for white people to own land in Haiti, a strict ban which was then included in the Haitian Constitution, may also have encouraged some black activists to start promoting the idea of emigrating to Haiti in the 1810s and early 1820s. Of course the creation of the ACS played a part. Fiercely opposed to colonization, African Americans produced projects which were somehow similar, but which they preferred to call voluntary or chosen “emigration.”

8In 1818, a young free black from New England named Prince Saunders fashioned his own plan of emigration to Haiti. Having been sent to England by white philanthropists to complete his education, Saunders met British abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, who asked him to persuade Henri Christophe, King of Haiti, to harbor African American emigrants on his island. During his first visit to Haiti, Saunders was hosted by Christophe, who sent him back to London to recruit teachers for his new schools. Back in London, Saunders published his Haytian Papers (1816), in which he praised Christophe’s administration. In the fall of 1818, he returned to Philadelphia to promote the merits of Haiti among free blacks and their white allies: his plan for the emigration of free blacks to Haiti was born. Together with Clarkson, Saunders finally persuaded Christophe to cooperate. The king even seemed willing to provide a vessel and an initial donation of 25,000 dollars. In the summer of 1820, Saunders was called to Haiti to discuss the details of his emigration plan. When Saunders arrived on the island, however, Christophe was being paralyzed by a heart attack. While he was still waiting to be received by the king, a rebellion took place and Christophe soon committed suicide. Though this put a halt to his project, Saunders remained convinced that thousands of free and newly emancipated blacks were impatiently waiting for an occasion to emigrate to Haiti. It was Jean-Pierre Boyer’s accession to power that allowed the plan to gradually take shape.

The first wave of emigration to Haiti in the 1820s

9In order to boost the local economy, which was mostly based on agriculture, Boyer launched an immigration campaign—it was undoubtedly inspired by Christophe and Saunders’s aborted project—encouraging free African Americans to emigrate to Haiti. Prospective immigrants seemed to represent a solution to the island’s problems: unskilled laborers would work in the fields or swell the ranks of his army, while craftsmen and merchants would revitalize the economy. Since Haiti would rid the United States of its unwanted free black population, perhaps it would also grant Boyer the diplomatic recognition he so desperately needed.13

10At that time, the Reverend Loring D. Dewey, a white abolitionist and agent of the ACS in New York, noting that most black New Yorkers did not want to go to Liberia (the West African colony just founded under the auspices of the ACS), began a correspondence with Boyer. In his letters, Dewey asked for many details covering all aspects of a potential migration of African Americans to Haiti—from the financial support Boyer was willing to give them, up to how the island was administered in terms of schools, religion, or laws concerning marriage. Boyer answered all these questions at great length, stressing that Haiti was willing to make hefty financial contributions towards covering the costs of emigration. While his letter made clear that his main motives were humanitarian, economic and diplomatic stakes aspects were also involved:

It must not be imagined that the want of an increased population in Hayti, is the motive which determines me to make this answer with the details into which I have entered. Views of a higher order direct me. Animated with the desire to serve the cause of humanity, I have thought that a finer occasion could not have presented itself to offer an agreeable hospitality, a sure asylum, to the unfortunate men, who have the alternative of going to the barbarous shores of Africa, where misery or certain death may await them. […] Every one can perceive perfectly that it will be an infallible means of augmenting the commerce of the United States, by multiplying relations between two people, the similarity of whose principles of legislation and government ought necessarily to render them friends, although a blind prejudice seems until now to have put obstacles in the way or more direct relations between the one and the other.14

11In a letter dated May 25, 1824, Boyer told Dewey that he would send a Haitian citizen, Jonathan Granville, as an official agent to the United States with instructions to cooperate with Americans in general and the ACS in particular— “the Philanthropic Society of which [Dewey was] the agent.”15 Granville arrived in New York in June 1824 with precise instructions from his government. In these instructions, Boyer mentioned the financial aspect of his proposal and specified that he was willing to accommodate 6,000 blacks in total—a number that may seem paltry in comparison to the 230,000 free blacks and 1.5 million slaves then living on American soil. Boyer’s proposal, however, seemed particularly generous at the time. Boyer offered land to would-be emigrants who promised to behave well and proved to be able cultivators. In addition, he proposed to advance part of the cost of transportation for the poorest blacks.16

12Many of the state colonization societies, which were usually run by and exclusively composed of whites, looked kindly upon the departure of African Americans to Haiti, because they saw it as the logical next step to the emancipation of slaves, and as the best solution to the rampant racial problems in the United States. Clearly, most of these organizations ignored or underestimated the considerable logistical and psychological problems posed by the transportation and settlement of African Americans in an environment with which they were not familiar. They believed that Haiti provided a convenient place for the deportation of free and emancipated blacks, combining economic and humanitarian advantages. Because the ACS would never support a scheme which would compete with its own African project, the white promoters of Haitian emigration had to create their own dissident branch of the ACS in 1824: the Society for Promoting the Emigration of Free Persons of Colour to Hayti. This company partnered with some prominent black societies of the North. Following Boyer’s proposal, African American abolitionists Richard Allen and James Forten founded the Haytian Emigration Society of Colored People in Philadelphia. In 1824 they published a brochure to the attention of free blacks who planned to emigrate to Haiti, in which they praised the island while at the same time giving all the details that an aspiring emigrant should know, such as information about the climate or how one should dress and behave on the island.17 The Philadelphians’ optimism was shared by New Yorkers, who in turn created a local branch of the Haytian Emigration Society.18 The enthusiasm displayed by many abolitionists contrasted sharply with the reservations expressed by the ACS. Among the antislavery newspapers committed to the cause of Haitian emigration was the Genius of Universal Emancipation run by Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, who in 1824 published “advertising” articles about Haiti, praising the abundance of food on the island and the reasonable cost of emigration and insisting on the ability of blacks to thrive in these friendly and favorable surroundings. In an era of growing racism in the North, even the most progressive abolitionists rallied to the idea of relocating black people for their own good, even though this global colonization scheme was unrealistic and so contrary to the wishes of most African Americans. But Haiti largely benefited from the aura of her glorious past and was seen as a “noble” place for relocation.

13Ultimately, relatively few free and emancipated blacks made the journey to Haiti. Why this first emigration scheme fizzled out is unclear, but one explanation may be the fact that after he had subsidized the transportation of 6,000 African Americans, Haitian president Boyer decided to cease all funding in April 1825. Boyer justified his decision by claiming that an American agent had embezzled part of the funds allocated to the transportation of emigrants,19 but there may be other reasons. First, President James Monroe refused to extend diplomatic recognition to the young black republic in 1825. Second, in that same year 1825, Haiti was forced to pay enormous reparations—some 150 million francs—in exchange for diplomatic recognition from France. It was an immense sum and far more than Haiti could afford. This may very well explain Boyer’s decision not to fund would-be emigrants anymore after that date.

14It is hard to know how many African Americans did make the journey to Haiti in the mid-1820s. Abolitionists assessed that 6,000 to 10,000 blacks migrated to Haiti in the 1820s alone. Historian Alfred Hunt believes that “several thousand” blacks migrated to Haiti in the 1820s, while Georges Corvington talks about a “massive emigration.” John Edward Baur and Leslie Manigat put forward the number of 13,000 emigrants, but none is able to give precise numbers as to how many of them survived and permanently settled there or how many returned to the United States after a brief stay on the island.20 Indeed, it appears that after an initial period of enthusiasm, many emigrants complained of their situation: they struggled with the language barrier as well as with social and religious differences. Having known better living conditions in the United States, African Americans were often disappointed with their experience in Haiti, which prompted many of them to return to the American soil which at least was familiar to them. The relative failure of this emigration movement was widely reported in antislavery newspapers and in the daily (white) local and national press.21 But it did not prevent other African Americans from promoting the virtues of emigration again soon after this first attempt. In 1830, many black activists, like those who met at the first National Convention of Colored People in Philadelphia, admitted that their peers might want to emigrate, but were still struggling to determine where they should go. In their eyes, Africa was tainted by its association with the ACS. Other areas closer to the North American continent were discussed, such as Canada, Mexico, and Haiti. Advocates of emigration to Haiti were still a minority in the 1830s: memories of the failed first attempt were fresh in everyone’s mind.

From Colored Conventions to Emigration Conventions: debating colonization and emigration in the antebellum era

15While this may seem at odds with the emergence of immediate abolitionism, it should be kept in mind that both the “stay and fight” doctrine and emigrationism coexisted in the antebellum period. The issues of colonization and emigration had never ceased to be debated since the creation of the ACS in 1816. The 1830s were no exception. They were marked by an almost unanimous opposition to the ACS. Many African Americans vehemently denounced the existence of a national conspiracy whose ultimate goal was to summarily deport all colored Americans to Liberia: “The churches, the schools, the steamboats, the rail roads, the stage coaches, the public houses, and the highways—the priests and the people—all, all are apparatus of torture, set in motion, to drive colored Americans to Liberia.”22 Even so, emigration was still being considered by some. Without urging their peers to leave the United States at any cost, a number of black activists did their best not to stigmatize those who wished to leave. Emigration was then often seen as some kind of “last resort” solution. In a troubled period marked by a tightening of laws against blacks—especially after Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831—and the doubling of the number of slaves between 1830 and the beginning of the Civil War, black leaders did not want to prevent anyone from trying to improve their condition by leaving the country. Adding to the complexity of the issue was the fact that many black activists “changed their minds frequently over […] emigration.”23 Sometimes fiercely opposed to the idea of leaving the United States, then more nuanced on the subject, and later seduced by the possibility of emigration, a number of black intellectuals were honestly torn by the issue and gave speeches or wrote pamphlets that now seem contradictory.

16The Colored Conventions of the 1830s and 1840s played a major role in these debates on emigration.24 An important step in the explicit endorsement of emigrationist ideas by black activists was when a National Emigration Convention of Colored People was held in 1854 in Cleveland, Ohio—a convention held shortly after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and profoundly divided the nation over the question of slavery. This special convention on emigration brought together 102 delegates from eleven states as well as Canada.25 During this convention, Martin Delany, a leading figure of emigrationism, presented his “Report on the Political Destiny of the Colored Race, on the American Continent,” which drew on a book he had published two years earlier, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Delany proposed a solution—a “remedy,” he called it—to the problem of blacks being denied citizenship in the United States: emigration. Attempting to single out a place where African Americans could move, Delany dismissed the North American mainland as well as parts of the world already populated by whites. He gave preference to the Caribbean area and Central and South America, including “the Island of Haiti, in the West Indies, peopled by as brave and noble descendants of Africa, as they who laid the foundation of Thebias, or constructed the everlasting pyramids and catecombs of Egypt.”26 In the end, the convention took resolutions endorsing emigration, but its delegates did not reach a consensus as to where African Americans should emigrate. Still, the convention established a National Board of Commissioners whose purpose was to facilitate emigration. The Reverend James Theodore Holly was appointed as a commissioner whose specific role was to study the possibility of emigrating to Haiti. Holly was convinced that Haiti was the ideal location—being a republic which was already “black,” ready to welcome African Americans, and eager to become a “promised land” for the black diaspora. Holly and the emigrationist movement as a whole took even more importance the following year at the 1855 Colored National Convention in Philadelphia. It appears that blacks then seemed tempted by emigration plans as long as they had no connection to the ACS. In a context that was therefore favorable to emigration, Holly organized his first visit to the island.

17Born of free parents in 1829 in Washington, DC, Holly became a member of the Episcopal Church in Detroit in 1852 and was immediately admitted as a candidate for Holy Orders. As he would repeatedly point out in his correspondence, Holly embraced the cause of emigration to Haiti very early in his career: “he […] vowed before he was 10 years old to become a Minister of God to labor among the Haïtien people as their Apostle and evangelist.”27 Aiming to become a missionary in Haiti, and evidently taking to heart his role in the National Board of Commissioners, Holly tried to convince the Episcopal Church to finance him for a mission to Haiti. A few weeks after being ordained as a deacon in 1855, Holly went to New York in order to ask Episcopal authorities to be named missionary to Haiti. Holly did not officially receive any funding, but private donors (members of the Episcopal Church, mostly from the Diocese of Connecticut, to which he then belonged) gave him enough money to go to Haiti. He finally set out on July 11 and arrived in Port-au-Prince on August 1, 1855.28

18When Holly arrived in Haiti, the island was still an underdeveloped rural country weakened by severe social tensions. The situation there was grim: after President Boyer was ousted from power in 1843, Haiti had had four presidents within four years and was torn by a quasi-permanent state of civil war. As his main aim was to investigate the possibility of establishing an Episcopal Mission on the island, Holly met all the clergymen already present on the island.29 Rapidly, he exposed his emigration plans to a Haitian named Émile de Ballette. Contrary to what has often been written, Holly did not meet Haiti’s Emperor Faustin-Élie Soulouque, who was then actively seeking to invade the Spanish part of the island and unite the whole island. Ballette was a judge, who had been educated in London and had converted to Anglicanism, and was therefore very favorable to the establishment of the Episcopal Church in Haiti. Within a few weeks, however, Holly found himself short of money and was forced to leave the island before being able to meet the Haitian authorities. Having returned to the United States, Holly tried again to convince the Episcopal Church of the merits of a mission in Haiti and started touring the churches of New York, narrating his short trip to Haiti to all who came to listen. The Episcopal Church was clearly not favorable to the official sending of a missionary to Haiti: they were not convinced that such a mission would be successful and were thus reluctant to fund an official mission there. They did agree with the idea of supporting Holly unofficially, i.e. letting him try an experiment for a year of two, before having the Church officially involved.30

19Still looking for financial support, Holly, now a Rector of St. Luke’s Church in New Haven, Connecticut, spent the year 1856 preaching in favor of Haiti, and in 1857 he published a book containing all his speeches on the subject. In Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race, he highlighted the political stability of the island. Although asserting that Haitians were not barbarians, he claimed that African Americans were more “civilized” or ahead of Haitian blacks thanks to their beneficial contact with American whites, thus stressing the civilizing aspect of a potential African American emigration to Haiti; for Holly, African American emigration would be part of a civilizing mission linked with the evangelization of the Haitian population. In August 1858, Holly took part in the Third Emigration Convention held in Chatham, Canada West. Again, the attending delegates refused to support a particular destination for emigration. They contented themselves with giving their consent to anyone considering leaving the United States. At that time, and even more so after the Civil War began, African Americans experienced a renewed interest in emigration to Haiti specifically—thanks, in part, to Holly’s proselytizing, but also to a new direct offer from the Haitian government.

Two convergent projects meet: Holly’s Haitian Mission and Redpath’s Haytian Bureau of Emigration

20In January 1859, General Fabre-Nicolas Geffrard took office as president of Haiti. Soon after, he started promoting an emigration policy, appointing white abolitionist James Redpath as head of the newly created Haitian Bureau of Emigration in the United States. Yet the emigration campaign only took off in 1860.31 Geffrard, who thought he had found an ideal solution to the limited manpower in his country, encouraged the emigration of free African Americans— though under less favorable terms than those offered by Boyer in the 1820s32— and asked Redpath to act for Haiti’s recognition by the American government.

21Redpath initiated a major propaganda campaign in favor of emigration to Haiti in October 1860. As he himself asserted in his first report to Haitian authorities, his strategy would include publishing a “guide” to Haiti, having major white and black newspapers publish articles in favor of emigration to Haiti, and approaching the African American leaders who had openly positioned themselves in favor of emigration.33 Redpath’s propaganda and recruitment work was undoubtedly facilitated by decades of “Haitian propaganda.” Indeed, black newspapers and antislavery periodicals had started advertising Haiti in their pages back in the early 1830s. Many African American activists had also lectured or written books on Haiti and the Haitian Revolution since the independence. These early speeches and publications had probably helped Redpath promote his own vision of Haiti, and Redpath easily managed to recruit prominent black activists in the late 1850s and early 1860s—including Holly, H. Ford Douglas, William Wells Brown and Henry Highland Garnet—as “agents” in the United States to help him advertise Geffrard’s generous offer. Their duties consisted in traveling to different states, recruiting “citizens of African descent, of the class, chiefly, of farmers and laborers,” informing them of the advantages of “Hayti as a home for the colored races of America,” sending Redpath the addresses of all the families intending to emigrate, and distributing his “circular” and copies of the laws of Haiti.34 Soon, Redpath did more than secure the influence of prominent African Americans. He created his own newspaper, the Pine and Palm, whose main aim was to advertise and encourage Haitian emigration. Thanks to Redpath and his team of agents, the first African American emigrants sponsored by the Haitian government left the United States in early 1861. According to publication notices in the Pine and Palm, the first sixty-two emigrants sailed from New York City on January 3, 1861. By the end of the year, around 1,172 emigrants had made the voyage to Haiti.35

22In the spring of 1861, Holly himself left Connecticut for Haiti, with 110 black emigrants from Connecticut and Canada but without any financial support from the Episcopal Church.36 When Holly and the emigrants arrived, they were welcomed by Geffrard and his wife in person, who gave them farmland in a place called “Habitation Drouillard,” three miles from Port-au-Prince. The small colony faced many hardships in the tropical climate and unfamiliar surroundings. The first months of this Haitian experience proved a nightmare for Holly and his community: “12 months of intense suffering, labor, and affliction; (in which time he [Holly] has buried the larger half of his family—mother, wife, and two children).”37 About a third of the emigrants died, and many of those who survived returned to the United States, so that a year later only about twenty emigrants remained, including Holly. At the end of the year 1862, John Herpsurn, an African American trader who had settled in Port-au-Prince, generously gave Holly one of his warehouses to set up his church. Holly thus moved into the city of Port-au-Prince in early 1863. In May of that year, he established Holy Trinity Church, the first Episcopal parish in Haiti, and started receiving regular grants from the Episcopal Church—which still refused, however, to officially appoint him as a missionary.38 True to his convictions, Holly took the Haitian citizenship in 1864: “I am now a Haïtien citizen, entitled to all the rights and immunities guaranteed to the same by the constitution and laws of my adopted country. I expect to live and die here.”39 In 1866, he organized three missions in Cap Haitien, Les Cayes and Cabaret-Quatre. Although he initially ministered to the English-speaking African American emigrants, his greater work was soon among the French-speaking Haitians, as his emigration project was part of a larger project of enlightenment of the Haitian people. The first native Haitian clergy—a priest and a deacon— were ordained in 1866 by the visiting bishop of Maine. By 1874, Holly’s work had grown to such an extent that a resident bishop was required. The General Convention of the Episcopal Church decided to create the Orthodox Apostolic Church in Haiti (Église orthodoxe apostolique haïtienne) and made Holly a bishop. Despite financial difficulties, the church was able to grow. Holly remained on the island until his death in 1911. Though his African American emigration plan may be called a failure, his “civilization plan” was more successful.

23Thousands of other free African Americans made the trip to Haiti in the early 1860s. William Seraille estimates that approximately 2,500 African Americans emigrated to Haiti in the early 1860s, admitting that their fate “remains basically unknown; perhaps many died in Haiti while others, unable to pay for their return passage, quietly assimilated into the society.”40 Like their predecessors in the 1820s, most were unable to adapt to their new environment; they too would complain of the climate and the language barrier, not to mention that most were urban dwellers and reluctant to work on the land that had been allocated to them. Once again, a large number of the emigrants who survived the harsh living conditions returned to the United States in the few months or years after their arrival. The recruitment of would-be emigrants stopped soon after the beginning of the Civil War, when most African American agents of the Haitian Bureau of Emigration turned their backs on this project: Henry Highland Garnet and H. Ford Douglass resigned from the Bureau in March 1861, and so did William Wells Brown in 1862. James Redpath himself eventually resigned from his post in the fall of 1862 to become a war correspondent for the Union.

24Even though the two major plans of voluntary emigration to Haiti failed, African American activists kept on praising Haiti and cherishing it as the one place where establishing an influent black nationality was possible. Haiti, which until the Civil War had been considered by some black activists as an ideal and idealized place to which African Americans who dreamt of becoming full citizens could emigrate, was later perceived by these very same individuals, now officially American citizens, as a kind of laboratory for the black diaspora. Such was the case, for example, of John Mercer Langston.41 Langston was appointed as Minister Resident and Consul General of the United States in Haiti in 1877 (he regularly met Holly during his stay there). Langston, who had learnt “how for more than seventy years, in spite of frequent revolutions, destructive often of thousands of lives and incalculable amounts of property, this people had maintained their nationality and independence,” was curious and excited to be able to observe Haitians on the spot. He hoped that “he would find in this negro country, with its Black Republic, a condition of life which […] would justify the dream of his youth with respect to an actual negro nationality.”42 By going to Haiti, Langston sought to draw lessons for his community—lessons that could perhaps be used for the “progress” of blacks in the United States and the advancement of their “race” throughout the world. In the end, Langston’s Haitian experience was much more than a simple diplomatic mission. It was the life-size experiment in the so-called “black nationality” he and other African American activists like Holly had been looking for, and an opportunity for him to evaluate the capabilities of his “race” to rise, in the United States, to influential political positions.

25For Holly and other African American activists before and after him, Haiti represented a haven for the black race, even if they never truly adhered to the idea of a geographical separation of human beings based on the color of their skin, because they did not consider segregation a solution to the problem of equality between races. In fact, in the nineteenth century, the African American community increasingly acknowledged its identity as a black diaspora. For the advocates of an emigration to Haiti, settling there was primarily a way to assess their humanity within a diasporic identity, and a means to resist white racism by using “race” as a factor of cohesion. Haiti had thus become, in the 1860s, African Americans’ promised land, and the best place to reconstruct their community and their identity—the only place where they could progress and work freely for the advancement of the black diaspora. “Here in this black nationality of the New World, erected under such glorious auspices, is the stand point that must be occupied, and the lever that must be exerted, to regenerate and disenthrall the oppression and ignorance of the race, throughout the world.”43