Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica after Emancipation

By Matthew J. Smith

In this moving microhistory of nineteenth-century Haiti and Jamaica, Matthew J. Smith details the intimate connections that illuminate the conjoined histories of both places after slavery. The frequent movement of people between Haiti and Jamaica in the decades following emancipation in the British Caribbean brought the countries into closer contact and influenced discourse about the postemancipation future of the region. In the stories and genealogies of exiles and politicians, abolitionists and diplomats, laborers and merchants--and mothers, fathers, and children--Smith recognizes the significance of nineteenth-century Haiti to regional development.

On a broader level, Smith argues that the history of the Caribbean is bound up in the shared experiences of those who crossed the straits and borders between the islands just as much as in the actions of colonial powers. Whereas Caribbean historiography has generally treated linguistic areas separately and emphasized relationships with empires, Smith concludes that such approaches have obscured the equally important interactions among peoples of the Caribbean.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781469617985

Matthew J. Smith

Matthew J. Smith is a lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica.

Book preview

Liberty, Fraternity, Exile

Liberty, Fraternity, Exile

Haiti and Jamaica after Emancipation

Matthew J. Smith

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Endowment Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2014 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved. Set in Quadraat by codeMantra.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: Préfète Duffaut, Jacmel (2000); courtesy of Legrand Monfle; used with permission of the estate of Préfète Duffaut.

Frontispiece: Deportation of Haitian Refugees at Port au Prince,

Daily Gleaner, 4 December 1908, © 1908 The Gleaner Company Ltd.

Complete cataloging information can be obtained online at the Library of Congress catalog website.

ISBN 978-1-4696-1797-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-1798-5 (ebook)

18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

Part of this book has been reprinted with permission in revised form from H. G. and Haiti: An Analysis of Herbert G. DeLisser’s ‘Land of Revolutions,’ Journal of Caribbean History 44, no. 2 (2010): 183–200.

For Ishtar

If he went up to the house on the reefs in December it was not to pass the time with those refugees but to be there at the moment of miracles when the December light came out, mother-true and he could see once more the whole universe of the Antilles from Barbados to Veracruz . . . the line of islands as lunatic as sleeping crocodiles in the cistern of the sea.

—Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Beyond the Mountains, the Sea

PART 1

Collapse, 1838–1859

1. The Opportunity of Freedom

2. One Common Ruin

3. Moral Revolutions

4. Between Empires

PART 2

Revolutions, Rebellion, and Refugees, 1860–1870

5. Return of Liberty

6. The Course of Time

7. The Troubles of 1865

8. War and Peace

PART 3

Disorder and Progress, 1870–1888

9. The Power of the Crown

10. The Unfortunate Republic

11. Perpetual Exile

PART 4

A New Imperialism, 1890–1915

12. Age of Promise

13. La République C’est la Paix

14. Through Colonial Eyes

15. A Party of Exiles

Epilogue: Binding Tides

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Maps and Illustrations

Maps

The West Indies and Central America, 1872, xvi

Jamaica and Haiti, ca. 1860, xvii

Illustrations

A. Duperly lithograph of emancipation celebrations at the race course in Kingston, 2 August 1838, 24

Notice for Haitian refugees in Kingston regarding return to Port-au-Prince, January 1859, 94

The eight accused in the Bizoton trial in Haiti, February 1864, 107

Morant Bay after the rebellion, 1865, 147

The departure of President Fabre Geffrard and family from Port-au-Prince, March 1867, 162

The arrival of President Fabre Geffrard and family in Kingston, March 1867, 165

President Lysius Salomon and the Port-au-Prince fires, April 1888, 235

A view of King Street from John Crosswell’s drugstore in Kingston after the earthquake, January 1907, 262

Guards stand at attention as rubble is cleared from Port Royal Street in Kingston after the earthquake, January 1907, 263

Sketch of François Manigat and J. Robert Love after their deportation from Haiti to Kingston, 24 January 1892, 273

Sketch of Rosalvo Bobo, Anténor Firmin, and P. F. Frédérique, 14 June 1908, 312

U.S. Marines in Haiti, 1915, 322

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book was planted in Haiti over a decade ago. Conversations with friends and families revealed in both delicate and conspicuous ways the intimate historical bonds between their country and mine. In Jamaica the idea grew. There it was encouraged by the same sources that gave it life in Haiti. Quite quickly it evolved from an intellectual curiosity into a more expansive project on interisland connections in the postslavery Caribbean, the results of which I offer in this study. By necessity I have had to travel within the Caribbean and back and forth across the Atlantic in order to tell this story. At every step of the way I have had the enormous privilege of a generous cast of people and institutions who supported me. It is with great pleasure that I thank them here.

I am indebted to the librarians and archivists who facilitated much of my research. In Jamaica Winsome Hudson, director of the National Library of Jamaica, and the staff of the NLJ have provided incredible service over the years. A very special thanks to Bernadette Worrell for her kind, patient, and enthusiastic help and for directing me to several very useful sources that I had not earlier considered and for which I am truly grateful. The staff at the Jamaica Archives in Spanish Town, the Island Record Office, and Father Gerry McClaughlin of the Catholic Archives have my deep appreciation. I must also thank the staff of the University of the West Indies, Mona, Main Library and the West Indies Collection for assistance. In Haiti I have had the good fortune for several years now of the support of librarians, archivists, and historians who have aided my research in so many ways. I thank Wilfred Bertrand of the Archives Nationales, Frère Ernest Even of Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Frères de l’Instruction Chrétienne, Patrick Tardieu of Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Pères du Saint-Esprit, and Mme. Françoise Thybulle, former director of the Bibliothèque Nationale d’Haïti. For assistance in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, I benefited from the expertise of the staff of the Enid M. Baa Public Library and Archives, especially Susan Lugo. Ronald Lockhart opened several doors. I owe much to Aiméry Caron for his incredible generosity and for teaching me the history of his island. I am also indebted to Rob Upson of the Caribbean Genealogy Library, who went beyond the call of duty more than once. In Curaçao I received friendly assistance from the staff of the National Archives. In England, I thank the staff of the UK National Archives, the Special Collections of the University of London’s Society for African and Oriental Studies, and the British National Library. In the United States, librarians and archivists at the University of Michigan, the University of Florida, Duke University, and Princeton University provided much-appreciated aid. Brooke Wooldridge and the Digital Library of the Caribbean deserve a special mention for being there.

In its earliest phase, research for this book was funded by the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (then CAAS) at the University of Michigan, where I enjoyed a Dubois-Mandela-Rodney postdoctoral fellowship. In that year I benefited tremendously from travel and research and having an intellectual space to discuss my formative ideas. In Ann Arbor Jesse Hofnung-Garskof, Julius Scott, Rebecca Scott, and Richard Turits offered valuable research advice, feedback, and inspiration.

That the book could be completed in the time it has is due in many ways to the unwavering support I have received from the University of the West Indies, Mona. In 2011 I was fortunate to receive a Principal’s Research Grant, which gave me time away from teaching duties to focus on writing. My gratitude to the Principal’s Office of the Mona Campus and the faculty who supported the project. My views of the Jamaican past have been influenced by the work of my colleagues in the Department of History and Archaeology, from whom I continue to learn. I thank particularly Waibinte Wariboko and Kathleen Monteith, who as department chairs encouraged this project. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Swithin Wilmot. Over many years I have profited from his gracious sharing of his extraordinary knowledge of Jamaican political history, which has shaped my perspective on the politics and society of the nineteenth century.

Much respect is due to other friends and fellow searchers of the past, who read, listened, commented, and counseled at various stages. Among a very long list I must mention Sunil Agnani, Roy Augier, Alice Backer, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, LeGrace Benson, Patrick Bryan, Thor Burnham, Carl Campbell, Jean Casimir, Michael Dash, Marlene Daut, Myrtha Désulme, Rachel Douglas, Laurent Dubois, Alex Dupuy, Ann Eller, Charles Forsdick, Julia Gaffield, Dorris Garraway, David Geggus, Alyssa Goldstein-Sepinwall, Michel Hector, Bobby Hill, Kate Hodgson, Regine Jackson, Deborah Jenson, Joy Lumsden, Georges Michel, Martin Munro, Melanie Newton, Nick Nesbitt, Enrique Okenve, Millery Polyné, Kate Ramsey, Grace Sanders, and Chantalle Verna. Several genealogists assisted me along the way and indulged my frequent and often obscure questions about the family trees of nineteenth-century Haitians and Jamaicans. Many thanks to Maxime Dehoux, Peter Frisch, Patricia Jackson, and Donald Lindo, and to Stephen Porter for his hospitality and for going the extra mile in hunting down information I really needed. A very special thanks to my ever willing and admirably professional research assistants, Lucienne Cross and Deroi Brown, for their inestimable help on this project.

Two readers for the University of North Carolina Press read the entire manuscript with care and offered constructive comments and immensely helpful suggestions for improvement. The book has benefited greatly as a result. I would also like to express my gratitude to Elaine Maisner, Paula Wald, Alison Shay, and the staff of UNC Press for consistent guidance. I must also add here my deep appreciation to Alex Martin for his precise and attentive editing. It has been a distinct pleasure working with them. Parts of this book were presented at several conferences and talks in the United States, the Caribbean, Germany, and the United Kingdom, and I thank all the institutions and colleagues for the opportunity to share and discuss my work. I am particularly grateful to Lara Putnam, who in 2008 invited me to participate in a workshop on Caribbean migration at the University of Pittsburgh, which helped advance my thinking about the book. Thanks to the Haitian Studies Association for providing a space for stimulating conversations on Haiti and most of all for the comradeship.

For technical assistance with some of the images, thanks to Heather Kong. For the cover image, thanks to Legrand Monfle, Galerie Monnin, and the family of Préfète Duffaut. For continued support over the years, a big thanks to Leo Roumer, Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo, and Frantz Voltaire. I am very grateful to Jean Victor Généus, whose mutual interest in the history treated in this book has been inspiring. Special heartfelt thanks to Babs and Siggi, for friendship, sanctuary, and much besides.

No declaration of appreciation could be sufficient for the Jamaican and Haitian families I consulted during my research. Although several families I researched did not make it into the book, the descendants of all of them trusted me with precious details and documents of their past. Wellesley Bourke has been a constant and patient supporter as many years as I have been working on this project. I thank him for that. In Haiti, Wellesley’s cousin, Claude Paquin, was also helpful, as was Pascale Duvivier. Nicola Crosswell-Mair, Peter Espeut, and various members of the Crosswell family across the globe unfailingly responded to my many inquiries and willingly offered whatever they could. If any of these families learn from this book something about the world of their ancestors it will be but small compensation for all they have given me.

It is my own family that I owe the most. Peter and Patricia Smith and Samantha Smith and Xavier Lopez deserve so much praise. They have nurtured my curiosities, tolerated my silences, and always reminded me of what is truly important in life. This book is dedicated to Ishtar Govia, my partner and my refuge. She has shared the sacrifices and motivated my progress from the beginning. Without her belief in it, and in me, this book would most likely have remained only an idea.

Liberty, Fraternity, Exile

The West Indies and Central America, 1872. Author’s collection.

Jamaica and Haiti, ca. 1860. Drawn by Edward Weller and published in the Weekly Dispatch (London).

Introduction: Beyond the Mountains, the Sea

Lieutenant Clarence Espeut Lyon Hall from Jamaica died in action on 7 July 1916 in the French village of La Boiselle, in the department of the Somme, during one of the bloodiest military campaigns of the First World War. The Somme offensive claimed the lives of more than 50,000 British troops, including soldiers like Lyon Hall who came from imperial territories. It was the greatest loss of life in any battle in the history of the British armed forces. Known for his bravery, Lyon Hall led his troops, the Fifth Battalion of the South Wales Borderers, out of the trench the soldiers called The Glory Hole and into an ill-fated attack on the German frontline. By the time of that courageous assault Lyon Hall was already a recognized war hero—he received the Military Cross for gallantry in the field a month before he died. At just twenty years old he paid the ultimate price for his loyalty, giving his life for king and empire in a war for liberty that tore Europe apart.

The life that ended on the bloodstained fields in France began thousands of miles away, in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Lyon Hall’s father, also named Clarence, was a Canadian businessman with interests in Haiti and Jamaica, and his mother, Marian Noëmi Espeut, was a Jamaican living in Haiti at a time when Jamaicans formed the largest number of English-speaking residents in that republic. In the year of Clarence’s birth, 1896, there were also hundreds of Haitians living in Jamaica’s capital, Kingston, which by then had become the most important site of the Haitian diaspora. Many of these people moved frequently between Haiti and Jamaica. Some, like Clarence Espeut Lyon Hall, claimed both islands—when he received the Military Cross he was reported as being of Haiti and Jamaica.¹

Yet Clarence Espeut Lyon Hall’s connections with Haiti, Jamaica, France, and England went much further back. His Jamaican mother was a descendant of French planters from the Grande Anse in the southern region of the colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). Her family joined thousands of émigrés who moved to the British colony of Jamaica 100 years before Clarence was born. Their migration was motivated by another bloody war for liberty that involved the great powers and had a monumental impact around the world: the Haitian Revolution. Pierre Espeut, the first of the family to arrive in Jamaica in the early 1790s, had joined the British army later that decade during the British occupation of Saint-Domingue. When the occupation ended in 1798, he returned to Jamaica, where he died that same year.²

The experiences of Pierre Espeut and Clarence Espeut Lyon Hall include striking parallels and ironic differences: one was a French planter who fled Saint-Domingue and supported the British in a war to reclaim it only to return to Jamaica, where he later died. The other was born a British subject in the country that emerged out of that revolution and later died in France fighting for the British. Each fought on a different side in a war for freedom and rights, and neither lived to see the outcome of the conflicts that brought him to foreign shores.

Between these two relatives—the monumental wars they were part of, and the five generations that separate them—exists a larger story of transformation in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century histories of Haiti and Jamaica; a transformation emblematic of the Caribbean itself during the same period. In the eighteenth century, Haiti and Jamaica were the two most profitable sugar colonies in the Caribbean. They brought enormous wealth to the French and British empires. Revolution and emancipation changed their course and pushed them into closer contact. The changes that each country endured were the product of struggles to adjust to freedom in the postemancipation period. The meaning of this freedom also went through profound transitions.

The liberation of all persons in bondage in Jamaica in 1838 gave freedom to all, but full recognition of individual liberties continued to be denied for many decades. In Haiti, independent since 1804, occupation by the United States in 1915 seriously tested the meaning of Haitian freedom. Over the long years in between the two countries and their citizens—including a range of classes and social groups, from former captives to former planters—had integrated contrasting interpretations of freedom into their relationship with dominant imperial powers, specifically Great Britain and later the United States. But these interpretations were also part of the islands’ relationship with each other. Events in the individual histories of Haiti and Jamaica caused the countries to become profoundly connected in the nineteenth century and then diverge in the twentieth.

This book is a history of Haiti and Jamaica that explores these connections. It examines the postslavery evolution of these neighboring, once wealthy sugar islands and their place in a world dominated by great powers that alternately neglected and asserted control of them. This is not a comparative study in the strict sense of the term. Indeed, I analyze the histories of Haiti and Jamaica separately at various points, but repeatedly I sew them together to show the presence of each in the worldview of the other during the epic series of events that defined the Caribbean’s long nineteenth century, a period marked by civil wars, rebellions, intervention, and imperial tensions in the arena of the Atlantic. In this book we also will examine how the bonds between the two societies were created by generations of Haitians and Jamaicans. These bonds were formed even before the Haitian Revolution, when Pierre Espeut arrived in Jamaica. But they had tightened a great deal by the time Clarence Espeut Lyon Hall was born in Haiti. We will explore these alliances by focusing on the people who moved between the two countries and interacted with one another—the refugees, exiles, politicians, transients, abolitionists, laborers, merchants, writers, travelers, diplomats, and families that, like the Espeuts, shared experiences that were of Haiti and Jamaica.

Pierre Espeut was one of scores of émigrés from Saint-Domingue who relocated to Jamaica in the earliest stages of the Haitian Revolution. Bringing with them enslaved people, these émigrés constituted a first wave of migrants from western Hispaniola to Jamaica. After the French abolished slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1794 and following the Napoleonic invasion of the colony in 1802, they were joined by hundreds more refugees in Kingston.³ Many of the first arrivals left Jamaica for permanent residence in other parts of the Americas, particularly New Orleans and Cuba. Others, like the Espeuts, stayed in Jamaica. As French citizens they attached themselves more to France than to independent Haiti. This affinity was enduring. Several of their descendants did not care to claim any ties to independent Haiti, preferring to celebrate their French ancestry. In 1898, fifteen years after the Haitian government paid the final installment of an injurious 1825 indemnity to France, heirs of those French colonists who settled down in Jamaica, claiming to be in a state of great indigency, wrote a petition to the British government through the Jamaican governor for outstanding debts owed their families for the destruction of their properties a century before in the Haitian Revolution.⁴ When this petition was drafted, Jamaica was six decades past full freedom. The first generation of émigrés bore witness to the immense changes wrought in both islands by the shattering of slavery’s edifice. Their relatives, all British subjects, would live to see how the legacies of slavery affected the direction of Haiti and Jamaica. The movement of French émigrés to Jamaica in the late eighteenth century was therefore the beginning of a long history of association that became more interwoven after emancipation.

The restless transition from slavery to freedom in the early émigrés’ native world was closely matched by the transformations in the world in which their children grew up. After the Haitian Revolution, British emancipation was the second greatest strike against slavery in the Caribbean. If external observers constantly worried about the extent to which these events would shape the region, this was an even more vital question for people living in the Caribbean. At stake was the reconfiguration of economic and political power after slavery’s end. This issue defined the evolution of Haiti and Jamaica from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and it guides the analysis here. Both worlds were at once obviously similar and radically distinct. Their parallels derived from a series of mutual crises stirred by the disenfranchisement of the majority population, political divisions, natural disasters (especially fires and earthquakes), and regional pressures. The greatest and most persistent problems were economic.

Jamaican and Haitian ruling classes spent the first decades after emancipation fighting fiercely and in vain to preserve a disintegrating plantation system. The experience was different for their former captives. Rather than compromise their freedom, the freedpeople moved away from the estates, a conscious rejection of the plantation world common to both countries.⁵ Freedom, however, had its ambiguities. In order to maintain plantation labor in a context of severe economic crisis in the sugar industry, the ruling elite constrained the freedpeople’s political liberties and reinforced social control measures. Neither strategy restored sugar productivity, which continued its inexorable decline. In Haiti coercive laws, mandatory passports, and militarily enforced restrictions on movement aimed to extract labor; in Jamaica the colonial state introduced new laws, implemented a police force, reformed the prison system, and routinely denied the rights of the peasantry, among other measures.

Although the dilemmas were similar, contrasts in status produced entirely different political outcomes. In colonial Jamaica, the freedpeople’s demand for better representation was answered by a tightening of the restrictive colonial apparatus. The one major outbreak of the era, the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865, was brutally put down by British forces. After that event Jamaica’s already sharply divided political elite surrendered the island’s centuries-old Assembly—a powerful institution of legislative self-governance that ruled with a governor appointed by the Crown—and accepted authoritarian direct rule from England as a Crown colony. Their action indicated both the island’s deep social divisions and elite fears of future revolts. Although it brought peace, British distrust of Jamaican self-government left a lasting tension between metropole and colony that would continue well into the next century.

Self-government was total in Haiti after 1804 and this alone made the republic a frequent recipient of international hostility. Haiti’s political elite, forced to contend with a more intense form of neglect, held to an exclusionary political culture defined by militarism. This structure, absent in Jamaica, facilitated a more explicitly authoritarian governance that became embedded in Haitian politics. Abuse of power and corruption may have been commonplace in Jamaica’s politics, but the imperial machinery and the frequent resort to it by local elites determined what types of political conflicts were possible. Haitian power struggles were decided otherwise; by rival military leaders who exploited division to political advantage. The fractures widened and the conflicts became more frequent and hard fought. In this way Haiti and Jamaica were clearly different, prompting scholars to associate nineteenth-century Haiti more readily with the vulnerable postcolonies of Latin America—which had a similar pattern of dictatorship and military overthrows—than with British Jamaica, which had neither revolutions nor civil wars.⁶

These fundamental distinctions explain a great deal about the separate political paths colonial Jamaica and republican Haiti took after emancipation. They can also conceal critical points of similarity that emerge even in discussions about the two countries’ differences. In Jamaica more than any other British colony, Haiti was presented as a warning of what the island could become without British rule. This popular idea relied on proximity, the close resemblance in postemancipation economies, and racial distribution in both places. In the wake of the Morant Bay rising, imperial commentators and their local supporters in Jamaica argued more forcefully than before that the island’s saving grace was British colonialism, which protected it from becoming a second Haiti. The term was intended to conjure a fearsome image of Jamaica beset with endless revolutions and race wars. It was wrong both in its assumptions of Haiti and of Jamaica’s potential. But it indicated how closely the two countries were held in the British imagination. It was, in fact, British imperialism that accounted for many of the connections between Haiti and Jamaica during the period.

Between the total abolition of slavery in Jamaica in 1838 and the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915, both Haiti and Jamaica, in contrasting ways, had to contend with the dominance of the British Empire. Jamaica defined its relationship with Great Britain as a subject colony forced to adjust to the far-reaching changes created by emancipation. The political losses Jamaica suffered after 1865, and a decline in interest from the Crown and British supporters—including abolitionists—altered the island’s social landscape. By the late nineteenth century, colonial elites were forced to reexamine their relationship with England under these new political arrangements and in a context of expanding U.S. imperialism.

Haiti, a free republic, had a different sort of relationship with Great Britain that scholars have never fully explored. For this reason, this book devotes much attention to British-Haitian relations after 1838, which not only facilitated the critical links between Haiti and Jamaica but, I will argue, was an important factor in Haitian diplomacy in the nineteenth century. The British Crown was the second major European power to recognize Haitian independence, albeit informally, and sent a representative to Port-au-Prince in 1826. In the year of full freedom in Jamaica, 1838, Great Britain officially recognized Haitian independence and expanded its commercial interests in the republic. These interests also brought emancipated Jamaica into closer contact with Haiti. Given the importance of the British Empire in the Caribbean, successive Haitian governments sought to establish good foreign relations with England. As a result, the Crown’s representatives in Haiti, the consular agents, had important roles and at times influenced political events.

The power of British influence in Haiti was demonstrated in 1865 at the precise moment of the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, when the British navy intervened in a civil war in Haiti. After that event Haiti’s leaders had an ambivalent relationship with Great Britain: while some leaders were wary of British representatives in Haiti, on several occasions members of Haiti’s political elite considered inviting British annexation as a way to lift Haiti out of its cycle of political revolutions. With increasing U.S. interest in the Caribbean and British imperial attention focused elsewhere, Haiti’s foreign relations turned more fully toward the United States.

The greatest British impact in Haiti lay outside commerce. In the nineteenth century, British diplomats had political influence in Haiti, although this waned as the United States became more involved in Haitian affairs later in the century. Even more important were Great Britain’s extraordinarily liberal asylum policies, which offered full protection and security for asylum seekers in Britain and its dominions. This situation proved to be of incredible value in Haiti, where political disorders led to the creation of a mobile community of refugees and exiles who sought safety under the British flag. These refugees included both rural Haitians and others less dependent on agriculture. Jamaicans, too, pursued opportunities elsewhere, including Haiti, where they imagined their chances were better. Chosen or forced, this displacement was a form of exile, and it was a major feature of Caribbean history after emancipation.

Exile has been associated with the Caribbean since the arrival of Africans to the region. In 1793, during the earliest stages of the uprising in Saint-Domingue, Bryan Edwards wrote in his famous history of the British colonies that the enslaved were Africans in perpetual exile—a weighted term that suggests an unending sense of dislocation, a condemnation of the exiled subject to live forever detached from home.⁷ But the term used by Edwards to describe the experience of slavery for the enslaved took on a different meaning entirely in nineteenth-century Haiti. By 1860 Haitian authorities used perpetual exile as a form of punishment for dissent or challenge to the state.⁸ By then exile had already become an omnipresent part of the Haitian experience. What were the consequences of exile in an age of freedom?

These Haitian exiles formed a second wave of Haitian migrants to Jamaica. Their profiles were notably different from those of the French émigrés earlier in the century. They were not French and could not claim allegiance to that nation; they were Haitian citizens born in a free republic. The complex nature of Haiti’s political revolutions between 1843 and 1915 increased Great Britain’s importance in Haitian affairs and the numbers of exiles in Jamaica. At the same time, Jamaica’s economic problems throughout the nineteenth century encouraged movement from the island to other countries in the Americas, including Haiti.

This mobile community provides a unique and extraordinarily rich window into the unfolding of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Caribbean. The place of exile in Haitian history has rarely been given serious treatment by historians, although novelists have long considered its implications. In most histories of Haiti the exiles disappear after they leave the republic. Scholars have paid greatest attention to Haitian communities outside the country from mid-twentieth century to the present, especially the Duvalier years (1957–86), when massive numbers of Haitians emigrated, principally to North America.⁹ Political upheaval in the 1990s also precipitated a large-scale out-migration. Yet it was during the nineteenth century that exile, which would come to define Haiti’s political history, took shape and developed. And it was largely through exiles and refugees that Haiti’s connections with Jamaica were forged.

The study of exile in the long first century of Haitian independence demands an exploration of the transitions in Haitian political history and its connections to the places where the exiles settled. At the time when Haitian exiles relocated to Jamaica, the Caribbean Sea, with its constant movement of people between the islands, was an escape for Haitians seeking safe harbor elsewhere. Jamaica was not the only island where Haitians sought refuge, but it was the most important. Its importance derived from both proximity to Haiti—which increased the likelihood of return—and the possibility of building strong networks with Jamaicans that would create economic and political opportunities.

When Haitians began arriving in Kingston by the hundreds in the early 1840s, Jamaica was Haiti’s only emancipated neighbor in the northern Caribbean. Abolition was still decades away in the United States and Cuba. This, together with the flexibility of British emigration laws, made Jamaica attractive to hundreds of Haitians of various social classes. It also allowed deep roots between the two countries to be laid early. Former presidents were the most noticeable arrivals. In the period covered in this book no fewer than a dozen Haitian presidents found refuge in Jamaica; four of them died there. This was a remarkable occurrence that says much about the place of Jamaica in Haitian political history. Exile was such a feature of Haitian political reality that a U.S. foreign minister sarcastically noted of Haitian politicians in 1883, No one ever dies in Haiti.¹⁰

But exile was not exclusive to political elites. Haitians with different backgrounds and purposes made the most of the route between the countries. Over time Haitian exiles established critical business and political networks that not only cut across the two islands but also had links in other places in the Americas. By pushing the boundaries that separated republic and colony, exiles brought Jamaica firmly into the worldview of nineteenth-century Haitians and vice versa.

In recent years scholars have begun to pay increasing attention to intra-Caribbean migrations as primary strands in the complex of Atlantic world networks. The goal of these studies is to force us to rethink conventional concepts of diaspora and migration and to deepen our understanding of one of the fundamental yet overlooked aspects of Caribbean history: travel within the region had as much—and sometimes more—impact on Caribbean people as travel to larger metropolitan sites. This book is a contribution to that effort.¹¹ As we will see, exile movements and interactions within the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Caribbean, though smaller than later mass migrations, influenced political debates and outcomes. This focus further illuminates the key role of regional circulation in the creation of modern trans-Caribbean communities, which are rooted in the migrations that took place in the decades after emancipation.

The two histories covered in this book cohere around the people who moved between Haiti and Jamaica. Their personal experiences, told through tracing several people and families over the period, contained larger stories of change. Tracking a transient population can be difficult; it involves widening the research net as much as possible in order to find the subjects as they enter, live in, and then leave places of temporary residence. This study blends a range of approaches and methodologies, including genealogy, microhistory, diplomatic history, and close reading of travel writing and Caribbean literature to capture the experiences of nineteenth-century exiles and political actors. Stitching genealogy with a patient reading of fragmentary archival sources and well-known records produces several rewards, none more cherished than a sensitivity to the human details of history that I hope to convey in these pages.

This is not the first study to examine Haiti and Jamaica together. From at least the early nineteenth century, writers frequently drew comparisons between the two places, though often to advance biased conclusions of a ruinous postslavery Caribbean. Such commentators planted disturbing fictions about both countries whose most frightful visualizations are still repeated in substance if not in form. These writings, some familiar, some less so, receive a fresh look in this book, which assesses their distortions within the comparative framework.

In 2001 Mimi Sheller’s Democracy after Slavery offered the first serious scholarly comparison of the two countries in the postemancipation period. Her powerful thesis, that ideas for a fledgling democracy briefly emerged in each country and drew on similar impulses, is persuasively presented through a close comparison of the political tumult in Haiti in the mid-1840s and Jamaica during the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865.

While sharing similarities with Sheller’s work and drawing on her arguments, this book departs significantly by shifting the angle of view to explore a different type of comparison over a longer period. It ties the histories of Haiti and Jamaica into a unified story that it takes beyond 1865 to World War I and the U.S. occupation of Haiti. The book also complements Sheller’s important analysis of black publics and peasant radicals in each country with detailed attention to the intersecting lives of Haitian and Jamaican elites. History writing on Latin America and the Caribbean over the past several decades has produced a nuanced appreciation of the lives of the majority populations as a more accurate indicator of how societies functioned and reacted to historical change. This is especially true of postslavery historiography. That excellent body of work and the debates and findings of several generations of scholarship on the complicated adjustments to freedom from slavery inform the narrative in this book.

But of all the social groups traced throughout this study, elite actors in both countries receive the most attention. It is not recognized often enough that historically elites in the Caribbean were far from homogenous. They may have shared similar views of the majority population, but they had their own in-group prejudices of color and class, and these were important aspects of their relationship with their societies. In Haiti and Jamaica, elites’ cultural views were heavily influenced by imperial attitudes, though patriotism marked their approach to politics. They wrote in newspapers, traveled frequently, closely studied the transformations in both places and had greater interaction with foreign representatives of Great Britain. Their social power sometimes extended beyond national borders, as elites established strong contacts across the islands through marriage, kinship, businesses, and exile experience. As the following chapters will show, these contacts could be drawn on during moments of crisis.

Examining elite spheres also reveals how their visions and actions were shaped by intraisland encounters. Jamaican and Haitian elites reacted to each other in multiple and often contradictory ways, at times reflecting common European—particularly British—and North American ideas about progress and civilization. But, more important, their ideas were composed from exchanges between the two societies, which often contradicted external views of the region and tightened fraternal attachments between the islands. Fraternity did not always generate positive results. Most Haitian presidents in the period covered worried about the destabilizing potential of alliances between Jamaicans and Haitian exiles in Kingston and later Jamaicans living in Port-au-Prince. Their concerns were not far-fetched. Some Haitian exiles, including former presidents, did use their connections with Jamaica to organize plots against the Haitian government, actions that troubled the colonial state as well. As we will see, there was suspicion, prejudice, and infrequent expulsion on both sides.

Whatever their nature, these exchanges made each society less alien to the other. In this book, and most fully in part 4, we will analyze the writings of journalists, travelers, and exiles who spent time in both countries. The Haitians and Jamaicans who recorded their surveys of each other’s societies possessed their own visions of their world and reflected on its possibilities and failings. They relied on mutual knowledge, local frames of reference, and the history of movement between the two countries. Most of all, they were sensitive to each other’s problems, treating their countries as conjoined by the exigencies of their times. In 1880 an article in Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner put the point succinctly: In ways more or less direct the prosperity and adversity of Haiti are ours also and this would in itself, be a sufficient reason and excuse for the interest that we take in our neighbor’s affairs.¹²

This book similarly articulates an alternative vision of Caribbean history. It does so by decentering ideas about postemancipation Haiti and Jamaica constructed by imperial observers and insisting on a regional perspective typically marginalized in the scholarship. It is a principal argument of this book that Haiti and Jamaica’s long nineteenth century can be differently understood by close study of their shared histories, bonded as they were by the community of people, ideas, and experiences that moved between them. This focus on connections between two emancipation societies separated by language, imperial history, and stark differences in political administration has implications for the broader study of the Caribbean. Most of all, it challenges classical interpretations that regard areas in the Caribbean organized only by common imperial experiences. On the contrary, the islands have always had greater degrees of integration than conventional narratives have allowed. To understand the many ways areas of the Caribbean are linked by more than colonial associations advances knowledge of the tangled processes that determined the region’s course after slavery.

In this study I treat Haiti and Jamaica as characters, their histories often crossing paths. Consequently, I at times contract various aspects of the past in order to tell a simultaneous history—a common hazard of comparison.¹³ Yet this approach has the benefit of making the intimacy of the interactions between the islands appear more sharply. Following national histories as they cross from port to port allows for a fuller appreciation of the networks that facilitated union and the contrasting reactions to common currents.

A full grasp of the layered connections that are the subject of the book necessitates discussion of political changes and their constraints in each country. These were complicated and numerous, especially for Haiti. However, the synthesized narratives of conflict told in these pages explain how early relationships between the countries were sustained and new ones forged in spite of seemingly repetitive political turnovers. This interpretive frame also brings forth elements of each country’s past that are not typically examined. In particular, the analysis and fusion of two histories in each chapter allows for new discoveries and fresh perspective on familiar events.

This book, then, presents a Caribbean story that moves with its actors back and forth between Haiti, Jamaica, and occasionally other locations in the Caribbean, and places that tale in the context of the enormous challenges of the postslavery age.

Part 1 of the book, Collapse, examines the countries in the two decades following emancipation in Jamaica. As chapter 1, The Opportunity of Freedom, reveals, for sectors of Jamaica’s elite the destruction of the centuries-old system of slavery created the possibilities for closer alliances with Haiti. Haiti’s political stability in the period was viewed as an attractive feature for an island whose postslavery future was ill-defined. But the image of Haitian stability was shattered in 1842 after several events, beginning with a powerful earthquake in northern Haiti, at the time the worst seismic disaster in the Caribbean. The story of that earthquake and the chain of events that followed are the subject of chapter 2, One Common Ruin. The major result of these events was the overthrow of Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer after more than two decades of rule—the first president to be overturned by a coup d’état. The ensuing period was marked by revolution, authoritarianism, and the exile of scores of Haitians to Jamaica. Chapter 3, Moral Revolutions, examines the postslavery economic context of Jamaica and the successive revolutions in Haiti, which led to a greater presence of Haitians in Kingston in the mid-1840s. This movement continued after 1847 and throughout the 1850s during the rule of Haitian emperor Faustin Soulouque. Chapter 4, Between Empires, considers this migration against the backdrop of the social and political challenges that each country faced. It also considers the role of British diplomacy and public opinion in Jamaica’s economic and social downturn and Soulouque’s brutal rule through the texts of diplomats and travelers.

Part 2, Revolutions, Rebellion, and Refugees, covers the transformative decade of the 1860s. Chapter 5, Return of Liberty, examines transformations in Haiti under President Fabre Geffrard. These efforts were undermined by several factors, including the economic constraints Haiti faced during the years of the U.S. Civil War, risings in the Dominican Republic, and, more important, the attempted revolutions against the president. Chapter 6, The Course of Time, covers the same period for Jamaica, highlighting the growing political tensions that resulted from that island’s dismal economic state. It also considers how Jamaican elites regarded changes in Geffrard’s Haiti in relation to their own state.

The tensions in each country exploded by middecade, with simultaneous outbreaks in northern Haiti and the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. These events are the subject of chapter 7, The Troubles of 1865. The separate crises were connected in the minds of diplomats, foreigners, and local elites, particularly in Jamaica. Central to their fears were the Haitians in Jamaica. The chapter focuses on key figures and families with ties to Haitian refugees and the ways their strength was exhibited in the political events that followed. Chapter 8, War and Peace, briefly discusses the aftermath of the 1865 risings on the political direction of each place. Jamaica became a direct Crown colony, and Haiti continued to experience civil war. But while these circumstances made the islands appear more distant after 1865, the contacts between families and political exiles who moved back and forth increased.

In part 3, Disorder and Progress, the story widens to include a critical examination of the prejudiced perceptions foreigners held of Jamaica and Haiti as the countries came out of the 1860s. Both were subject to racist misconceptions popularized in the texts of late nineteenth-century travelers and imperial investigators. Chapter 9, The Power of the Crown, focuses on Jamaica. The chapter summarizes the changes in Crown colony Jamaica that according to British writers such as J. A. Froude spared Jamaica from Haiti’s fate of cyclic political instability. The chapter considers the reactions of Jamaicans and Haitians in Jamaica to Froude’s claims and their own interpretations of their countries’ future in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Chapter 10, The Unfortunate Republic, shifts the discussion to Haiti. The complex series of events in the 1870s forms the backdrop for an analysis of British writers on Haiti, including Froude’s contemporary Spenser St. John, and the responses of Haitian intellectuals who challenged their views. These chapters inform the social and political history covered in chapter 11, Perpetual Exile, a detailed examination of the presidency of Lysius Salomon. Salomon, a central figure in this book, was deeply affected by a twenty-year odyssey as an exile, several years of which were spent in Jamaica. The chapter also considers reactions to Salomon’s rule by Haitian exiles living in Kingston, their Jamaican allies, and the little-known community of British West Indians who moved to Port-au-Prince.

The final part of the book, A New Imperialism, examines, from different angles, internal responses to the looming shadows cast by both the United States and the British Empire on Haiti and Jamaica from the turn of the century to the First World War and the U.S. occupation of Haiti. Chapter 12, Age of Promise, explains how U.S. imperialism spurred opportunities for growth in Jamaica’s moribund economy. The increased presence of the United States on the island coexisted, uneasily at times, with a strong devotion to the British Empire. Adding further contrast to Jamaica’s changes in this period were the regular flow of people between Haiti and Jamaica and most dramatic of all, a destructive earthquake in 1907 that bookends the natural disasters discussed earlier in the book.

Haiti, too, experienced notable changes as the nineteenth century drew to a close, and chapter 13, La République C’est la Paix, details how a decade of peaceful political relations created the opportunity for development in the republic. This peace was challenged by the persistence of conflicts orchestrated by military rivals and powerful foreigners with vested interests in Haitian politics. As a result, Haiti’s rulers in the late nineteenth century had mixed views of foreigners, including Jamaicans, living in Haiti.

The heightened attention paid to Haiti by imperial powers—and their frequent denigration of the republic—sparked the interest of contemporary Jamaican writers, journalists, and travelers to Haiti. Their views and prescriptions for both countries—which differed in important ways from the views of European and North American travelers—are the subject of chapter 14, Through Colonial Eyes. Haitian intellectuals, such as the celebrated lawyer and writer Anténor Firmin, championed their own ideas for Haitian progress. Firmin went further than his peers by challenging his military rivals for state power. In chapter 15, A Party of Exiles, Firmin’s National Progressive Party—which, in the main, consisted of exiles living in Kingston—becomes a focal point for discussing the major transformations that took place in Haiti between 1902 and 1915. As the party struggled in vain to gain power, Haiti spiraled into political turmoil, giving way to U.S. intervention. The chapter discusses the events that led to military occupation, not from the familiar perspective of U.S.-Haitian relations but through the unique lens of the Jamaican press, British diplomats, and Haitians living outside the country.

At the heart of the story that opens in the following pages are the many people who, like the hero-soldier Clarence Espeut Lyon Hall, were part of an illimitable Caribbean unbound by nation, language, or empire. Exiles in many respects, they lived in a universe in which the unending quest for liberty, fraternity, and equality was not restricted by national borders. As they ventured on their search they came to regard their experiences on each island as part of a continuous story. The narrative in this book is populated by several such people, whose lives are woven into the broader histories of Haiti and Jamaica. By following them over the course of decades, we glimpse their private struggles to assert themselves in an evolving region. For some, the outcomes were tragic as were the histories of the islands, which often flowed into each other throughout the nineteenth century. Others were able to find solace in new spaces as they adjusted to the dramatic and gradual changes of their times. With repeated crossings and over several generations, the people in this story realized that even if their past was tied to continents far across the Atlantic, their destinies could be found in places much closer—on islands beyond the mountain range of their native lands and just a short distance by sea.

Part 1: Collapse, 1838–1859

The Vodou gods have charged me to convey to Jamaica a few emigrants from Jacmel. . . . This is a different story.

—René Depestre, Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, 1988

One: The Opportunity of Freedom

George William Gordon had the future of Jamaica uppermost in his thoughts when he arrived for a special meeting at the Half Way Tree courthouse in the parish of St. Andrew. On that morning in August 1842, Gordon—a merchant and colored representative of the St. Andrew vestry—and the men who preceded him through the heavy doors of the courthouse hoped for new opportunities for Jamaica. They came ready to take action on an issue that had occupied them for four years: the opening of unrestricted trade and communication between Haiti and Jamaica.

Commercial relations and regular travel between the two close neighbors had been prohibited for decades owing to their radically opposite positions: Haiti was a free nation; Jamaica