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

Caribbean Crossing: Africans Americans and the Haitian Emigration Movement is microscopic in its focus. Sara Fanning closely examines the 1820s, when Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer sought recognition from both the United States and France “to improve the standing of his nation” (p. 119). One way Boyer tried to do so was by encouraging the migration of free African Americans to Haiti. Fanning exposes the dramatic confluence of events that led to Boyer’s concerted effort to recruit migrants. She argues that Boyer played on the nature of racial politics in the United States and was more diplomatically astute, more of a “wild card in America’s nineteenth-century race relations,” than historians have previously thought (p. 119).

The author shows Haiti’s persistent political struggles for recognition by other nations. She is also adept at peering closely into African American communities to reveal the multiple reasons some people did emigrate to Haiti. The first wave of migrants came at a critical time, when the American Colonization Society planned to repatriate thousands of freed blacks, and Haiti, a symbol of Atlantic slavery’s defeat, was proposed as an alternative destination for communities of freed African Americans. Although some of the first wave of emigrants ultimately returned to the North American mainland, those who stayed set up successful communities and engaged in the sugar trade. Some lived communally, sustaining African American lifeways in Haiti.

Fanning’s book is best in the final chapters, where she details the lived conditions of migrants in Haiti and the rationales some people had for staying there. Fanning convincingly posits that those who left Haiti did so for multiple reasons: increasing taxes, difficulty sustaining coffee production, the disease environment, and increasingly restrictive laws. For some, Haiti had begun to look eerily like the United States. But many of those who stayed, thrived. Those who settled in Samana and lived communally, near Boyer’s residence in Port-au-Prince, survived and made Haiti work on their own terms.

Fanning’s work enriches our understanding about how this island republic exercised its sovereignty and struggled to define itself after the revolution. The book should sit alongside Chris Dixon’s African America and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn., 2000). Both books probe the subject of black emigration to Haiti. Dixon covers the story broadly, viewing emigration through the lens of black nationalism, while Fanning’s research examines emigration only during the first phase. Fanning’s historicity and close attention to detail and evidence make her book a compelling story. The picture Fanning paints of the racialized political and economic landscape that both African American emigrants and the leaders of Haiti had to contend with in this period makes for good history. The chapter layout and broad argumentative structure works well, but each chapter also contains curious comparisons to Irish and German migration that inadvertently undermine the book’s overall focus on African American migration to Haiti. The unique migratory experience of African Americans, their political alienation, their fear of the slave regimes of the South, and their feelings of being outsiders in both the United States and Haiti are somehow lost by inserting these comparisons, which diminishes and distracts from the importance of her research. Still, Caribbean Crossing deserves to be read because of its clarity, its methodology, and its multidimensionality.