Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States by Leslie M. Alexander (review)

Reviewed by: Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States by Leslie M. Alexander Philip Yaure (bio) Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States. By Leslie M. Alexander. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022. Pp. 344. Cloth, 125. 00; paper, 27. 95. ) The history of Haiti is the history of a revolutionary Black republic in a perpetual struggle to preserve its sovereignty. In 1825, a French flotilla extorted an "indemnity" at cannon-point to compensate the metropole for the financial losses it incurred from Haitians' self-liberation from slavery and colonial rule. A 2022 New York Times report calculated the cost of this indemnity—really a "ransom, " the report's authors observed—at 560 million in today's dollars; its ultimate impact on Haiti's economy, they assessed, was between 21 and 115 billion. 1 This indemnity, and the international debts Haiti incurred to pay it, set the republic on a path of intervention and exploitation by colonial powers as well as internal political instability. The United States has played an outsized role in this history, from its refusal to formally recognize the Republic of Haiti in the first half of the nineteenth century and its efforts to compel a lease of the Môle Saint-Nicholas for a U. S. naval base in the 1890s, to its twenty-year military occupation (from 1915 to 1934) and interference in Haitian elections. Yet, as Leslie M. Alexander demonstrates in Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States, the story of Haitians' struggle to preserve their hard-won sovereignty "is not only one of victimization; it is also a story of hope, determination, and solidarity" (6). In this rich yet highly accessible volume in the University of Illinois Press's Black Internationalism series, Alexander argues that the issue of Haitian sovereignty was an essential site for the development of Black internationalism—the active struggle for global Black liberation. Focusing on the relationship between Haiti and enslaved and nominally free Black Americans from 1804 (Haiti's founding) to 1862 (when the United States formally acknowledged Haiti as a sovereign nation), Alexander shows how Haiti animated the Black freedom struggle in the United States such that its participants recognized the liberation of Black Americans and the protection of Haitian sovereignty as linked inextricably. Haiti catalyzed Black internationalism in the United States, Alexander contends, as both a "model republic" and "potential home" (190). From the Colored National Conventions, on the antislavery lecture circuit, and in the pages of Black antislavery newspapers including Freedom's Journal and the Colored American, Haiti was marshaled as decisive proof of Black people's capacity for self-governance. Disputes in antebellum U. S. political discourse about the extent and causes of Haiti's political instability End Page 252 thus came to implicate Black Americans' claims to political equality in the United States, and Black abolitionists were frequently at pains to preserve an idealized image of the republic despite its internal strife. The "image of Haitian sovereignty" forged through revolt also inspired the resistance of enslaved Black Americans. Alexander shows that the Haitian revolution animated the political imaginations of those involved in the 1811 German Coast Revolt in Louisiana, Denmark Vesey's plot in South Carolina, and the 1831 rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, led by Nat Turner. Black Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century conceived of their freedom struggle as continuous with the Haitian Revolution, and as an extension of the ideals embodied by the image of Haitian sovereignty. This continuity between Haitian self-liberation and the Black American freedom struggle also operated in the other direction, in the emergence of a movement to facilitate Black American emigration to Haiti. Frederick Douglass's public contemplation of emigration to Haiti, on the eve of the American Civil War, is perhaps its most famous episode, but Alexander details the rich contours of the movement's two waves, from 1820 to 1829 and 1853 to 1863. (One of Alexander's important contentions is that the second wave began much earlier than prior histories have recognized. . .