Jonathas Granville

Source

Jonathas Granville was one of the agents sent by Jean-Pierre Boyer to attract free African-American settlers to Haiti in the 1820s. It's interesting to see what the man looked like, although it does little to change my views of the Boyerist clique as disproportionately lighter-complected than the Haitian people, due to their interest in monopolizing political power. According to Wikipedia, the brother even married a cousin of Boyer, showing how interconnected all these Boyer elites were through blood, kin, and color (but the Wiki lacks proper citations).

I have blogged about the 1820s movement of 6,000-13,000 free blacks to Haiti here, but Pamphile offers some additional data on the 1820s emigration experiment that was an abysmal failure. According to him,  Boyer emphasized how similar Haiti was to free blacks from the US than an unknown and culturally different Africa (even though Haiti would prove to be very different culturally, socially, and linguistically for African Americans), Boyer funded the scheme (via Granville, Dewey, an American Presbyterian minister, and others) with coffee exports on the expectation that free blacks would labor as agricultural workers, and some interest and help from Philadelphia's black middle class and prominent people, such as Bishop Richard Allen. Granville spoke at gatherings for the emigration society, minimized differences between Haitians and African Americans, and left private writings that reveal a rather condescending view of the free people of color of the antebellum US ("“The colored people here are, whatever they say, in such a state of abjection that each time I am with them I feel that their degradation reflect on me.").

As Pamphile and other observers have noted, the emigration of the 1820s was doomed to fail in some key ways First, most of the free black emigrants were artisans and urbanites with no interest in agricultural labor like Boyer and the Haitian state desired. In addition, the cultural, religious, political, and social gap between African Americans and Haitians proved insurmountable to many, at least to one perspective in Port-au-Prince. Moreover, American recognition of Haiti never came, so Boyer ceased funding the migration in 1825! Intriguingly, Pamphile does suggest that blacks from the US who were mulattoes were more successful at integrating themselves into Haitian society, citing Benjamin Hunt to demonstrate how some of the US people of color were mulattoes who were accepted into the class and color structure of Boyer's Haiti. I suppose that last part ain't too surprising, but it certainly increases my interest in black immigrants in 19th century Haiti.

One of these days I'll have to blog about later emigration schemes or parallels in the Liberia/Sierra Leone cases and Haiti. I am certain there are other cases of black immigrants from other parts of the African diaspora to Haiti, such as Felix Darfour (from Darfur but educated in France), blacks from the French Caribbean (Papa Doc himself was of Martinican descent), or the case of slaves from the British Caribbean and "Dominicans."