Mississippi weighs deporting its black population and picks the poll tax

In October 1890 the Jackson Clarion in Mississippi reported a proposal to deport black Americans to the Congo. The state constitutional convention sitting that year did not take it up. It reached instead for a literacy test, a poll tax and residency and registration rules, which cleared black voters out of Mississippi politics while keeping their labour in the fields. Removal schemes had circulated for seventy years and kept failing on the same two facts. Nobody ever had the money to transport, maintain and resettle more than a few thousand people, and the people concerned did not want to go. Ten years later the journalist John Temple Graves told a conference on race relations at Montgomery in 1900 that two antagonistic races could not grow up side by side on equal terms in one territory and that separation was the only answer. By then segregation statutes were doing the work deportation had promised, at no cost and without losing the workforce.

Rear Admiral Bancroft Gherardi brought the warship Philadelphia into the harbour at Port-au-Prince on 25 January 1891, with the Kearsage and the Enterprise in company. He stayed aboard and hailed the United States minister to Haiti, Frederick Douglass, to come out to him. What Gherardi wanted was a lease of the harbour at Mole Saint-Nicolas at the island's northwestern tip. His instrument of persuasion, in Douglass's account, was a squadron carrying several hundred guns and two thousand men. Haitians called the business the Gherardi affair and read it as a move to sell the country to Americans. Douglass wrote afterwards that he had found himself somewhat in the position of a servant with two masters. Antenor Firmin refused the request on 22 April, reporting that the Haitian cabinet held a lease to be an outrage on the sovereignty of the republic. Firmin resigned on 3 May and left for Paris. Douglass resigned in July.

Dahomey had been the dominant power on its stretch of the West African coast since the 1720s. French forces conquered it between 1892 and 1894, and the kingdom stopped existing as a political entity in 1900, when the French removed its last king. A degree of institutional continuity survived through rituals performed at the royal palace in the capital city of Abomey, which became a museum. The defeat also loosened the rules about what could be spoken. The origins of the royal clan had been guarded as a secret held inside the dynasty, and no account of them appears in any European source written before the monarchy was destroyed. Within about a decade of the conquest a French colonial official named Le Herisse published what became the classic version of Dahomian traditional history, taken from a single informant, Agbidinukun, a brother of the last independent king Behanzin who served the French as a district chief. What the palace had kept turned into a printed book.

The Jamaica International Exhibition opened in 1891 under Governor Henry Blake. Kingston was hung with wreaths and triumphal arches, fireworks were set off, and visitors came in from the countryside and from abroad over the fourteen weeks it ran. Haiti had attempted the same thing ten years before. The Haitian Exhibition of 1881, staged under Lysius Salomon, failed to raise the foreign interest in Haitian agriculture that its organisers wanted. Jamaica hoped for more and got less than it spent, since the show ended as a financial loss. The colony counted tourism and foreign investment as the real return. Royal Mail steamers arriving weekly were joined by United Fruit ships bringing visitors from Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore. Government money then went into hotels, and the Myrtle Bank, the Constant Spring and the Queen's became the places tourists stayed. Both islands were being drawn into an American commercial system, from opposite ends of it.