From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870–1964

1. “The Spirit of the Age . . . Establish[es] a Sentiment of Universal Brotherhood”: Haiti, “Santo Domingo” and Frederick Douglass at the Intersection of the United States and Black Pan Americanism

1 “The Spirit of the Age . . . Establish[es] a Sentiment of Universal Brotherhood” Haiti, “Santo Domingo” and Frederick Douglass at the Intersection of the United States and Black Pan Americanism After the bloody and transformative events of the U.S. Civil War (1861– 1865), when the emancipation of enslaved U.S. blacks and the preservation of the federal government raised a relative sense of optimism for U.S. African Americans and the nation, Washington officials were optimistic about the possibilities of expanding their realm of influence and power. Former Republican senator of New York and U.S. secretary of state William H. Seward (1861–1869) led the charge for expansion because the promising growth of U.S. manufacturing and trade industries demanded new markets . As early as the late 1820s and 1830s, the White House considered annexing new territories such as Cuba.1 Inspired by the end of slavery and the reunification of U.S. states, renowned abolitionist and public intellectual Frederick Douglass became intrigued by the benefits of annexation for willing Caribbean and Latin American states because it integrated these nations into the fold of U.S. prosperity and hopefulness. On December 30, 1871, the Chicago Tribune reported that Douglass had lectured the previous evening “with characteristic force and eloquence” in support of the United States’ annexation of Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic). Addressing a predominantly white crowd at Union Park Congregational Church in Chicago, Douglass asserted that the annexation debate must be understood from a more humane and “more poetic side,” in which an individual viewed the nations of the world as her homeland and the world’s citizens, her compatriots. During the 1860s and 1870s, not only did U.S. expansion of telegraph lines, ship- 26 · From Douglass to Duvalier ping routes, trade markets and territorial boundaries incorporate a myriad of domestic economies but, in fact, “the national economy itself became more thoroughly integrated into a world economic system.”2 During the post-U.S. Civil War era, these technological and industrial advances, as well as an emerging sense of hope and in some cases nationalism among newly freed U.S. African Americans, complemented Douglass’s weltanschauung of interconnectivity and egalitarianism among nation-states within the global arena. At the same time, Douglass distinguished between an intervention based upon compassion and native consent and an annexation that was “rapacious ,” that dreamt “only of wealth and power” and “of national domain” in the “name of manifest destiny, which [was] but another name for manifest piracy. . . .”3 As a staunch abolitionist Douglass created a universally moral and cultural world where the physical and psychological brutalities of slavery and racism could not be justified by proslavery and polygenetic racial arguments or vicious imperialists.4 Douglass’s “moral absolutism” rejected the greed and aggressive exploits demonstrated in racial slavery, the violent expansion into sovereign Mexican territory during the 1840s and the atrocious policies of displacement toward its Amerindian population .5 Concurrently, Douglass adamantly believed in the potential for development (industrial, technological, cultural) of Santo Domingo because it remained a sovereign, antislavery nation that independently sought the protection of the United States. Yet Douglass argued for a cooperative effort by the U.S. and the Dominican governments that would dissolve the latter’s independent status. In a statement whose ethos and cadences presaged U.S. president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address in January 1961, Frederick Douglass noted ninety years earlier: “It may, indeed, be important to know what Santo Domingo can do for us, but it is vastly more important to know what we can do for Santo Domingo.”6 How does one reconcile Douglass’s support for the annexation of Santo Domingo alongside his clear protests against “rapacious” U.S. empire building ? Was he an idealist, uncritical of the impact of nonviolent colonialism? Why did he advocate U.S. intervention in Santo Domingo when in 1891, as U.S. minister to Haiti, he opposed the United States’ efforts to lease a coaling station, Môle Saint-Nicolas, from Santo Domingo’s neighbor, the Republic of Haiti? In July 1891, Douglass resigned from his post as U.S. minister when it became unmistakably evident that the U.S. State Department wanted to obtain the coaling station against the will of the Haitian The Spirit of the Age · 27 government, an aim that challenged the sovereignty of the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere. This chapter analyzes Frederick Douglass...