Philadelphia forms a society to send black Americans to Haiti

In the summer of 1824 the black elite of Philadelphia organised the Haytien Emigration Society. Bishop Richard Allen was its president and his son Richard was its secretary. James Forten and Quomony Clarkson were among the members. President Jean Pierre Boyer had invited free black Americans to settle in Haiti and backed the scheme, and the society used official statements from his government to publish a pamphlet for people considering the crossing. The argument it made was constitutional rather than sentimental: Haiti was a country where a black man could exercise his rights. The founding of the republic had already changed how black Philadelphians described themselves, and the emigration plan was the practical form that pride took. The society sat inside the same institutions that had built the African Church three decades before, which is why its officers were clergy.

The Cour Prevotale ended abruptly. Late in 1826 an order from the metropole suppressed it, and the reaction in Martinique was anger. The governor disbanded the court reluctantly while predicting that poisonings would climb again at once, and the slaveholders who had used it, and served on it, objected. Two years later, by a royal ordinance of September 1828, France applied the Napoleonic penal code of 1810 to its remaining Caribbean colonies, a code mentioning poison only as an instance of voluntary homicide and punishing divination and similar practices with a fine and a few days in jail. In 1831 the Martinique council drafted rules for applying the new law to enslaved people. The draft kept the old fear of societies formed to poison, and made the killing of an owner by any means a parricide, and for the first time in a century it treated sorcery and medicine as separate from poison.

Against the standard account of Haiti as a target of foreign predation, Girard sets out its own record on the eastern side of the island. Louverture invaded in 1801 and withdrew when Leclerc arrived. Dessalines invaded in 1805, a campaign remembered chiefly for rape, torture, plunder and the enslavement of prisoners as his troops retreated. Boyer succeeded in 1821 and the occupation lasted twenty three years. When the Dominicans declared independence in 1844 the Haitians launched a failed campaign to recover them, followed by three more invasions under Soulouque in 1849, 1850 and 1855 that pushed the border out along the central plateau but never delivered the whole island. After that Haiti financed rebellions in the east in 1861 and 1870 and then stopped. Girard argues the retreat from empire tracked the collapse of Haitian military power rather than any change of principle. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard reframes nineteenth century Haiti as an imperial power in its own right rather than a consistent victim of imperialism.

Hormann tracks the closing and reopening of British argument about Haiti. Enthusiastic appraisals of the 1791 revolt by British abolitionists appear in 1791 and 1792 and then virtually stop after 1793, in abolitionist and radical writing alike, because members of parliament and the interests behind them recoiled from even discussing the end of the slave trade while it seemed likely to invite a repetition of events in the French colony. Thomas Clarkson, who had written on the revolt anonymously in 1792, mounted a very cautious defence of the Haitian Revolution again only in an essay of this year arguing for gradual emancipation in the British colonies. The chapter treats that thirty year silence as a political effect with datable causes, not as the boundary of what Europeans were capable of thinking.