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1854

A black emigration convention sends its own envoy to Soulouque

African

In the 1850s despair at the Fugitive Slave Law and at tightening restrictions across the northern states pushed black leaders to reopen a question many had closed. Boyd quotes Frederick Douglass, a firm opponent of African colonisation, telling Americans in 1853 that the continent and the nearby islands already held more than twelve million people of African descent who needed only organisation to become one powerful nation. The emigration convention held at Cleveland in 1854 sent James Theodore Holly to Haiti to open discussions with the government of Faustin Soulouque, but the regime fell before anything was settled and a new republic under Fabre Geffrard took its place. Geffrard also wanted colonists from the United States, and several hundred people sailed from New Orleans for Port-au-Prince in 1859. What was still missing, in Boyd’s account, was a definite programme.

Source  ·  p. 170 Boyd, 170