In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

{179} 4 N& Frederick Douglass’s Hemispheric Nationalism, 1857–1893 This chapter takes as its starting point a little-known column, ‘‘The Colored People and Hayti,’’ that Frederick Douglass printed in the January 1861 issue of his Douglass’ Monthly. Announcing that the Haitian government had recently appointed James Redpath as its general emigration agent,Douglassprovidestheaddressoftheoffice,221WashingtonStreetin Boston, for those African Americans who wish to gain ‘‘necessary information ’’ about the possibilities of emigrating to Haiti. During 1853–54, when Martin Delany and his supporters were advocating black emigration to the southern Americas, Douglass would occasionally print pro-emigration columns in his newspaper only to rebut them. Much had changed by 1861. As Douglass notes in the same piece, he had published a number of essays, official documents, and letters on Haitian emigration over the past several months, and ‘‘we notice that nearly all of our exchanges are favoring the movement.’’ Consistent with this trend, Douglass subsequently inserts into his column an article from the Worcester Spy in which the writer contemplates the persistence of slavery in the United States, decries the ‘‘inhuman legislation’’ that ‘‘trample[s] out all of the few rights the free colored population have hitherto enjoyed,’’ and then turns his eyes to the southern Americas and offers a prophecy on race and empire: We believe the inevitable logic of events points plainly to the ultimate growth in the equatorial regions of the American continent, of an empire controlled by the mixed races of African blood. The islands of the American Archipelago are to-day virtually in possession of that mixed race. In all of the British West Indies the white population are vanishing—so with the other islands. Cuba, though now in the possession of slavery, is fast becoming Africanized, and must ultimately pass into the hands of a free colored race. St. Domingo, or Hayti, as it is more properly called, is governed by the colored race. The eastern {180} Douglass’s Hemispheric Nationalism or Spanish part is under the government of the Dominican Republic, and the western under that of the Haytian, administered by its present enlightened head, President Fabre Geffrard. These republics have maintained their independence for nearly seventy years, and have secured a recognition of their nationality from all the principal governments of the civilized world, with the solitary exception of this Union.∞ Rather than undermine this prophecy, Douglass prints in the same issue a ‘‘Call for Emigration’’ released by F. E. Dubois, a black Philadelphian who recently had become Haiti’s secretary of the interior, along with a column entirely authored by himself, ‘‘Emigration to Hayti,’’ in which he admiringly describes Redpath at his Boston emigration office. Remarking that there are many good reasons for African Americans to consider emigrating to Haiti, Douglass offers a surprisingly upbeat assessment and even endorsement of the movement: ‘‘Let every emigrant go to Hayti with the purpose to give the country his best energies, and we will be bound that the country will take care of him and fulfill his highest expectations.’’≤ Arguably, Douglass’s apparent support of selective African American emigration to the black republic of Haiti has much to do with his longstanding concerns about U.S. whites’ efforts to expand slavery into the Southern Hemisphere. In one of his initial columns in the North Star, he had attacked the ‘‘horrid conflict’’ with Mexico as a brazen effort to enlarge the domain of U.S. slavery, and he regularly warned in the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper that the United States, under pressure from southern slave owners, was ‘‘whetting his talons for the capture of Cuba.’’ Following South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks’s vicious caning of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner in the chambers of Congress in May 1856, Douglass declared that the South’s overarching goal was ‘‘to make Slavery national, so that the rule of the South shall become the rule of the North,’’ and then he voiced an even greater apprehension about southerners’ imperial ambitions: ‘‘They purpose to plant Slavery in South America, to overthrow the Black government of Hayti; and possess themselves of the West Indian islands, and to reduce this whole continent to the rule of slavery.’’≥ In the context of this specter of a white southern slave empire in the Americas, Douglass’s reprinting in the January 1861 Douglass’ Monthly of a writer envisioning an ‘‘African’’ empire in the southern Americas could be taken as a form of desire, [3.145.36.10] Project MUSE...

Share