1870, June 30: (Charles Sumner Saves Haiti: The Senate Vote and the Deep Freeze): The U.S. Senate rendered the annexation question moot when, responding to the eloquence of Charles Sumner (who,…

1870, June 30: (Charles Sumner Saves Haiti: The Senate Vote and the Deep Freeze): The U.S. Senate rendered the annexation question moot when, responding to the eloquence of Charles Sumner (who, like his fellow abolitionists, had close and confidential relations with the Haitian legation in Washington), the chamber split 28-28 on June 30, 1870, withholding the two-thirds majority Grant’s treaty required. Before rigor mortis set in, the corpse twitched a few more times, but this was the effective end of the business, producing a deep freeze in Haitian-American relations until Grant finally abjured the project, while the Haitian legislature named a Port-au-Prince street for Sumner and hung his portrait in the Chamber beside the Amis des Noirs of 1789. The structural irony of Sumner’s intervention was that Haiti’s sovereignty was preserved by an internal disagreement within the imperial metropole, a pattern that would repeat across the nineteenth century, in which the Black republic’s survival depended on the rivalries and scruples of the very powers that threatened it.