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."

African-American Settlers in Boyer's Haiti

Estimated destinations for African-American settlers in Hispaniola under Boyer's rule, 1818-1843. This is based on low estimates of a total of 6,000 free African Americans rather than the high estimate of perhaps 13,000. Many if not most of these African-Americans returned to the US due to cultural differences, religious differences, and a lack of interest in agriculture (or lack of support). Map taken from here.

I recently re-read Sara C. Fanning's thought-provoking "The Roots of Early Black Nationalism: Northern African Americans' Invocations of Haiti in the Early Nineteenth Century," which can be found here. Fanning also wrote a fascinating thesis that goes into great detail on interests of Haitians and African-Americans in supporting the emigration plan, particularly regarding Boyer's government's interest in US recognition as well as other economic and social factors that pushes as many as 13,000 African-Americans to settle in Haiti. I shall return to her thesis for a future post on the fate and experiences of African-Americans who did immigrate to Haiti during Boyer's presidency. Anywho, here are some interesting facts one can 'gleam' through  Fanning's article. 

1. One of the many reasons free African-Americans were interested in Haiti and emigration was due to increasing persecution and racism across the United States. States considered legislation that placed additional limits on the movement of free black people. Voting laws were established in places like New York City that disenfranchised the mjaoiry of the free black population. Southern states such as South Carolina passed laws that prevented black sailors from staying in Charleston, decreeing that they must stay overnight in the city's jails at their own expense. Since maritime labor was a large source of employment for free black males living along the eastern coast and major cities of the United States, laws such as this, with obvious discriminatory intent and impact, became another push factor for African-Americans to leave the United States.

2. Another reason African-Americans would have felt an interest in Haiti is the lack of interest and connection to Africa. The American Colonization Society, which included free blacks, white slaveholders and abolitionists, sought to convince free blacks to emigrate so as to rid the US of them, thereby removing a potential influence on other slave population. Haiti, unlike the largely unknown African ancestral homeland, possessed a republican ideology of government, presented itself as a defender of the African race, and its military success against France and other European powers in the Haitian Revolution inspired African-American resistance as well as fueling nascent black nationalism. The notion of a strong, independent black state in the Caribbean with a republican government, progress covered in American newspapers, and a militaristic, black masculinity embedded in Haitian political culture, must have appealed to free black men in the US who were victims of white attacks and racist laws. Indeed, the tale of the Haitian Revolution has a long history of praise and emulation in the US, where African-Americans, slave and free, were proud to be Haitian.

3. The free black Masonic lodges across the US were another source of Haitian interest. Like the Masonic lodges in Haiti itself, a zone of male privilege and politics, Masonic lodges for free blacks provided insurance for the community and social spaces where black men could come together on their own terms. Fanning highlights Prince Hall's A Charge to African Masons, which illustrates solidarity and African diasporic bonds with the people of Haiti. It would be interesting as a field of inquiry in itself to examine how Freemasonry in Haiti and African-American Freemasonry intersected. Indeed, the first New York African Mason Lodge opened under the name Boyer Lodge, after Jean-Pierre Boyer of Haiti. 

4. The policy of Haitian states pushing for African-American immigrants goes all the way back to Dessalines. Dessalines offered American ship captains forty dollars per immigrant. Such a policy is understandable given a desire to repopulate the island after perhaps a quarter or more died in the Haitian Revolution. Petion and Christophe also saw African-Americans as a potential source of manpower, repopulation, special skills, and manning naval ships. Paul Cuffee, Jr., also traveled to Haiti in 1812 to participate in the Haitian market, another instance of prominent free blacks engaging in trade as well as serving upon Haitian ships. 

5. Christophe had Prince Saunders, a prominent free black educator and son-in-law for a while to Paul Cuffee, actively working to bring African-Americans to Christophe's kingdom. Petion, on the other hand, tried to entire African-American immigrants through his constitution, which granted citizenship to any descendant of Africans or Indians after residing for one year. Under Boyer, the Haitian state made the most progress in attracting African-Americans, through Haytian Emigration Societies and propaganda in the person of Jonathas Granville, speaking to black audiences while promising land, agricultural tools, wages, freedom of religion, and paying for the passage of emigrants. As many as 13,000 African-Americans would come to Haiti in the 1820s due to Boyer's government's propaganda and the high place of Haiti in free black communities' thoughts. In fact, several prominent African-Americans supported the plan, such as Richard Allen, Peter Williams, and James Forten. Prince Saunders would stay in Haiti and serve under Boyer, too. Allen's son migrated to Haiti for a while, but returned when economic conditions were less favorable for the manufacturing industry. 

Boyer's acceptance of an absurd debt to pay France for recognition, the enactment of the Code Rural, high prices of food, cultural differences, lack of government support and land distribution as well as the collapse of coffee exports in the 1820s led to many African-Americans deciding to return home. In addition, Fanning's thesis claims that perhaps as many as 4000 African-Americans concentrated in and around Port-au-Prince rather than being more evenly distributed throughout the island. Such an overconcentration given the lack of appropriate resources and government aid, as well as anger directed at Americans for a smallpox epidemic, would have made things tense for African-Americans. If only Boyer had renegotiated the treaty with France, supported education, established a shipyard in Samana (where the only recognizable community of African-American descendants survives, in today's Dominican Republic), and given more support for immigrants' control of their own mobility, then perhaps many if not most of these African-Americans with needed skills would have stayed. They could have manned Haiti's naval ships, helped establish some manufacturing and textile industries, brought Haiti into closer ties through trade with free blacks in the United States, and, presuming Boyer also did not cut off trade with neighboring Caribbean islands, aided Haitian economic expansion and trade in the Caribbean and beyond. Oh well, what I want to know at this point is the influence of African-Americans from the 1820s who stayed in Haiti and lived through Boyer's wrong-headed rule. 

African Americans and Brazil in the 1920s: The Search for Eldorado

Meade and Pirio’s article makes several suggestive and useful points in addition to revealing an aspect of African American emigrationism usually not mentioned. They begin their analysis providing some context for the long history of emigrationism and its ties with black nationalism, pointing to Liberia in the 1840s being the best example. However, white philanthropists and racists who saw blacks as incapable of being integrated into American society supported this form of emigrationism. By the late 19th  and early 20th century, however, many black nationalists espoused emigration to Africa or elsewhere without the aid of white philanthropists, including Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and Chief Alfred Sam. Unfortunately, African American settlement in Africa proved to be impossible during this period since the entire continent besides Ethiopia and Liberia were under colonial rule, and neither of the aforementioned independent nations were willing to accept black settlers due to the resistance of European colonial powers. Since the possibility of a black-ruled territory in Africa was ruled out, some fringes of the Garveyite, black nationalist movement across the US began to focus on emigration to Brazil and Latin America to escape racism and form an autonomous black nation in the Americas that could act as a beacon of anti-colonial and black nationalist ideology for Africans.

Ironically, Brazil, beginning in 1889, promoted a policy of whitening or branquismo that barred entry to blacks while offering favorable deals for agricultural land or work to white immigrants from Europe and North America. The vast majority of the 4.1 million immigrants were whites, usually from Portugal, Spain, and Italy, who were concentrated in southeastern Brazil. However, black nationalists favoring emigration to Brazil kept promoting it through different UNIA chapters, the black press, and because Brazil lacked the explicit signs of racism and discrimination seen in the US. Falling prey to the racial paradise image Brazil wanted to export, blacks saw Brazil as a land where racial discrimination was non-existent, a land where a black man could even be elected president! Other blacks who actually visited Brazil during the 1920s realized that it was only possible for blacks to prosper if they were skilled workers or professionals, but many continued to believe it was a racial democracy because miscegenation was encouraged, which obviously deviates from the US policy of strict Jim Crow. Thus, because blacks, whites, and multiracial Brazilians were more likely to mix and the absence of obvious, explicit racist organizations or policies, African Americans saw Brazil as an Eldorado where black farmers and workers could create their own independent, black-governed society.

The Brazilian government pressured the US to reject visas of African Americans from entering the country during the period. However, since the Brazilian state did not want to tarnish its image of a racially tolerant nation, they never explicitly stated that race was the factor in denying entry to blacks from North America. According to Meade and Pirio, another reason for Brazilian state opposition to black nationalist settlers was a desire to insulate the race consciousness and politicized manifestations of Afro-Brazilian resistance. Although they are reluctant to admit it due to a lack of further evidence, both Pirio and Meade present evidence that black sailors knew of and participated in the spread of black nationalism across the Black Atlantic, including coastal Brazil. Furthermore, the rise of Frente Negra Brasileira, an Afro-Brazilian civil rights organization in the 1930s, suggests that the black nationalist politics of Garveyism did indeed permeate Brazilian society. The organization sought cultivation of racial pride, organized black militias, held military-style parades through Sao Paulo and Rio, and sponsored all-black commercial and industrial businesses and schools. Clearly, black nationalism, specifically that of Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, resonated with and influenced Afro-Brazilian resistance to white supremacy.

Since black North Americans idealized Brazilian race relations while Afro-Brazilians themselves 

were living in society dominated by the whitening ideal, this gulf underscores the importance of comprehending race as a social construct. African-Americans, seeing the lack of organized white hate groups and formal, racist policies, even took the existence of a multiracial impoverished Brazil as evidence of racial democracy. This essay also opens up several questions as to the relationship between black nationalism and black civil rights movements in Brazil and Latin America and their relationship with the contemporary movements in the United States. Brazil, a nation where black nationalism and separatism were said to take place less frequently than the US, where a strict one-drop rule operates and clear demarcated lines for segregation of the races exists, nevertheless resembles the US because of racist immigration and domestic policies. In addition, the fluid, pro-miscegenation views of race developed in Brazil, though dividing people of African descent based on how much white ancestry they have, did not hide the goals of branquismo to reinforce a hierarchy where white tops everything else, regardless of the degree of racial mixing.

The only weakness of the article is the reluctance to identify the influence of Garveyism on the Black Movement of the 1930s and the later decades of it, during the 1970s. The authors also neglect to mention the role of Haiti as a destination and seeker of black immigration during the 1820s, when an estimated 6,000 African Americans actually settled in Haiti. Although most eventually left, some of their descendants can be found today in Samaná, Dominican Republic. Though Haiti was later rejected as a suitable location for black emigration, it’s early role in African American emigrationism and black nationalism cannot go unmentioned.