1826-00-00: (Boyer Encourages the Immigration of Freed Black Americans to Haiti, the First Group Arriving From Philadelphia and Settling on the Samaná Penins…

1826-00-00: (Boyer Encourages the Immigration of Freed Black Americans to Haiti, the First Group Arriving From Philadelphia and Settling on the Samaná Peninsula, an Experiment in Pan-African Solidarity That Would Leave English-Speaking Descendants Still Living There Two Centuries Later): In the mid-1820s, Boyer worked with the American Colonization Society to encourage freed Black Americans to immigrate to Haiti. The first group of freed Blacks arrived from Philadelphia in 1824 and settled on the Samaná peninsula in the eastern part of the island, territory Haiti had seized from the Dominican Republic in 1822. Boyer’s motivation was both ideological and practical: he believed in the solidarity of Black people across national boundaries, and he needed farmers to revive the agricultural production that the Code Rural had failed to compel from unwilling Haitian peasants. The experiment produced a lasting community. In the twenty-first century, roughly eight thousand English-speaking descendants of those original immigrants still live on the Samaná peninsula, a pocket of African American heritage embedded within Dominican territory, a living artifact of a moment when the first Black republic in the world reached across the ocean to offer a home to Black people whom the United States refused to treat as citizens.