Caribbean Crossing: African Americans and the Haitian Emigration Movement by Sara Fanning (review)

Caribbean Crossing serves as a counterpoint to contemporary research on African American emigration and Haitian independence. Whereas recent scholarship, such as Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic, has examined African American émigrés’ return to the United States, Caribbean Crossing focuses on the political and economic factors influencing African Americans’ emigration to Haiti in the mid-1820s. By supplementing broader narratives of African American emigration and Haitian independence with archival research, ranging from newspaper advertisements to passenger lists and consular reports, Caribbean Crossing explains the significant roles that African American emigration and the Haitian emigration movement have played in debates on race relations in the United States and nation-building in Haiti.

Caribbean Crossing delineates the dissatisfaction and idealism driving African Americans’ emigration to Haiti, beginning with a thorough discussion of a Haytian Emigration Society of Coloured People meeting of 120 free African Americans at an African Zion Church in New York in September 1824. The society president, Rev. Peter Williams, represented the United States as a “house of bondage” and Haiti as the “highly favored, and as yet only land, where the sons of Africa appear as a civilized, well-ordered, and flourishing nation,” where there is “no prejudice or racial antagonism” (1-2). Williams emphasized that emigrants’ “conduct” would determine the “success” of African Americans’ emigration to Haiti (1); however, Caribbean Crossing’s subsequent analysis of Haiti’s unique and strained geopolitical history with multiple countries, such as France, Spain, and the United States, signals multiple factors impeding the success of the Haitian emigration movement.

Caribbean Crossing also situates the Haitian emigration movement in the broader context of migration in the 1820s, which is described as the beginning of “the first mass migration, with more than 140,000 migrants settling in the United States during this decade alone” (19). Whereas the Haitian government financed African American emigration to Haiti in the mid-1820s, “[p]roviding transport, food, supplies, and housing for up to six thousand migrants willing to cultivate lands in Haiti” at a cost of “as much as $300,000,” European governments “rarely sponsored or financed” emigration projects (17, 21). Therefore, Caribbean Crossing aligns African American emigrants most closely with “Puritan ‘Pilgrims,’” since both groups “sought refuge from exclusion in the home nation in the actively sympathetic philosophy of the new nation” (17). Yet the political distinctions among 1820s migrants remain more abstract than the economic incentives, which also influenced Haitian leaders’ consideration of African American emigration and United States capital as a means to address labor shortages and decreased coffee and sugar production following the Haitian Revolution.

Caribbean Crossing traces the degree to which Haiti’s leaders pursued African American emigration to improve Haiti’s political and economic stability. Haiti’s earlier leaders, such as Toussaint Louverture’s General, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who “ordered the total elimination of all white French residents living on the island” and was assassinated by Haitian landowners, sought African Americans to “bolster Haiti’s population, add new laborers, secure skilled manpower, and supply additional military personnel against a possible foreign invasion” (29). Henry Christophe, Dessalines’s second in command, who ruled the north following Dessalines’s death, considered financing “American black settlement” before committing suicide during an attack on his palace (36-37). Alexandre Pétion, the head of the Haitian Congress who ruled the south after Dessalines’s death (31), advertised Haiti as “a sort of black United States that offered its citizens universal manhood suffrage, religious freedom, a constitutional republic, and a maturing capitalistic society” (38). Following Pétion’s death in 1818, Pétion’s aide, Jean-Pierre Boyer, was elected president, and Boyer’s diplomatic appeals for American recognition and economic incentives for African Americans facilitated the emigration of “as many as thirteen thousand” African Americans to Haiti in the mid-1820s (1).

Caribbean Crossing argues that Boyer’s American recognition project challenges historians’ representations of Haiti “as an isolated nation, as a marginal...