The "Dark Star": New Scholarship on the Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution

The book more directly addresses a third dimension of US-Haitian ties: US emigration to Haiti - nothing is said of black Haitians who immigrated to the United States, a topic that has attracted some attention recently (Nash 1998; Branson and Patrick 2001; Girard 2010). Fanning, [Maurice Jackson], and [Jacqueline Bacon] all touch on this issue, but the most detailed essay on the matter is Alexander's, at least as it pertains to the US side of the story (very little is said of the Haitian government's own motivations for subsidizing immigration from the US to Haiti). She shows that emigration schemes regularly blossomed in the 19th century, particularly under Jean-Pierre Boyer in 1 820-25, then again, less famously, under Fabre-Nicolas Geffrard in 1859-61. For lack of research, the author unfortunately adds little to Chris Dixon's African America and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (2000). The actual number of emigrants, for example, remains vague: in a single page, it goes from "between 4,000 and 5,000" with "thousands more" to follow, to "6,000", then "13,000," without any evidence to back any of these numbers (62). US emigration to Haiti was the only episode when numerous black Americans actually came in contact with the reality of the Haitian Revolution, so a more thorough study of the emigrants' experiences in Haiti would have been fascinating (most eventually returned to the United States, so one surmises that a gaping cultural chasm undermined hopes of racial brotherhood). Because they did not research Haitian sources, the authors tend to oversimplify the complexities of the US-Haitian relation, often to create a false sense of pan- African unity. Alexander and Fanning, for example, write that [Jean- Jacques Dessalines] offered to pay $40 for every "African American" brought to Haiti by US merchants (43, 59). Dessalines's offer (and a similar one by [Toussaint Louverture] in 1801) actually only applied to Dominguan slaves who had been brought to US shores by French planters during the Haitian Revolution. Fanning further explains that "the Haitian constitution in 1805 created the first 'black Republic'" and that black Americans felt a sense of kinship toward Dessalines's regime because "with an executive, legislative, and judicial branch, Haiti's governmental forms resembled the United States' system of governance" (42). The claim displays a lack of understanding of Haiti's political culture under Dessalines: 1805 Hait