Paternal Solicitude and Haitian Emigration: The First American Occupation?

The expansionist projects of the first decades of the United States, such as Thomas Jefferson’s desired “Empire of Liberty,” metaphorically whitened the new nation’s geography by denying African American citizens any legitimate claim to the landscape and displacing the First Nations. Shortly after the War of Independence, national policies to “protect property” became, for many, a continuation of colonialism rather than the creation of a land of freedom. Thus African American writing from 1790–1830 often expresses an anti-imperialist stance. This essay considers how black authors protested the idea that the American landscape was white space—the dominion of the descendants of European colonizers. Since the greatest inspiration for anticolonial sentiments came from the free black nation of Haiti, which cut ties with France in 1804, many black leaders advocated emigration. By projecting the ideals of a land of liberty upon a different New World landscape, they sometimes replicated imperial paradigms, but this essay argues that a different kind of emphasis on the relationship of land and labor distinguishes African American expansionism from American imperialism.