Dream and Dread

Focusing on Frederick Douglass’s “A Trip to Hayti” (1861) and the first installment of James Theodore Holly’s “Thoughts on Hayti” (1859), this essay examines the strategic idealization of Haiti in mid-nineteenth-century African American propaganda. Engaging with critiques of positive Haitian exceptionalism, the author argues that Douglass and Holly constructed Haiti as an exceptional symbol of Black liberation not merely to counter Haiti’s silencing but also to contest the anti-Black foundations of that silencing. Through biblical allusions, hyperbolic rhetoric, and affective appeals, they framed Haiti as a promised land and challenged the “unthinkability” of Black self-governance. This essay demonstrates how these propagandistic representations functioned as deliberate counternarratives to the erasure of Haiti’s revolutionary legacy. Beyond combatting erasure, these counternarratives of positive Haitian exceptionalism also provoked popular political consciousness and discourse about Haiti among African Americans facing multiple social and political crises in the years leading up to the US Civil War.