The Light of Knowledge Follows the Impulse of Revolution

8/20/2019 The Light of Knowledge Follows the Impulse of Revolution

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^Slavery^Abolition Slavery & Abolition

Ajournai of Slave and Post-Slave Studies

ISSN: 0144-039X (Print) 1743-9523 I

The Light of Knowledge Follows the Impulse of

Revolutions': Prince Saunders, Baron de Vastey

and the Haitian Influence on Antebellum Black

Ideas of Elevation and Education

Peter Wirzbicki


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Slavery & Abolition, 2015 iîRoutledge

Vol. 36, No. 2, 275-297, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2014.941184

'The Light of Knowledge Follows

the Impulse of Revolutions': Prince

Saunders, Baron de Vastey and

the Haitian Influence on Antebellum

Black Ideas of Elevation

and Education

Peter Wirzbicki

This article details the influence that Haitian ideas about education had on early btack

intellectuals. Following the successful slave revolution, leaders of the new Haitian stale

set out to develop a new educational system. African-American observers paid close atten

tion to these developments and often attempted to mimic them. Especially important was

the black traveller and activist Prince Saunders, who was hired by the Haitian King Henry

Christophe to build schools. Combining social and intellectual history, this article argues

that black intellectuals in the North were inspired by the memory and symbol of Haiti to

develop an education system and elevation ideology that served explicitly political

purposes.

One of the defining features of antebellum black civic life was the extraordinary

importance that activists and community leaders gave to self-education and ‘elevation’.

From Baltimore to Boston, Schenectady to San Francisco, this impulse manifested

itself in the creation of black libraries, debating clubs, schools, lyceums, writing

groups and other organizations dedicated to elevaLing the community. Recently

these organizations, as well as the broad ‘elevation’ impulse that gave birth to them,

have received significant scholarly attention. Historians and others have reignited a

debate abouL the political content of black education and uplift in the years before

the Civil War. However, they have missed an important component to the story

Peter Wirzbicki is Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Science Division at the Universityof Chicago, 5845 S. F.llis

Avenue, Cates Blake 327, Chicago, EL 60637, USA. Email: pwjr/bickiís>i!íiiieago.i>iiu

■£: 2014 Taylor St Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2014.941184http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2014.941184


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2?6 Peter Wîrzbicki

about eleva Linn: the degree to which the memory of the Haitian Revolution and the

symbolic and direcL pull of the state that emerged from it shaped this impulse and

influenced these intellectual clubs and schools. Flows of knowledge betweenAfrican-American communities in the North, Haitian intellectuals, and British and

French polemicists opened radical possibilities for black education and elevation.

Historians are still coming to grasp the importance of ideas abouL elevation and self

education - and the clubs and institutions in which those impulses manifested them

selves - to antebellum black life. Forty years ago, Frederick Cooper seemed surprised

when he noticed that early black newspapers were more likely to write about education

than about slavery, and historians still too often accept the idea that the elevation

impulse was a distraction from true radical anli-slavery politics. Thus, Joanne Pope

Melish positions the rhetoric of self-improvement as an internalization of black sub

ordination as ‘people of color had little choice but to accept the burden of proof of

their inherent worthiness’. Patrick Rael sees more political potential in these clubs,

arguing Lhal while the elevation ideology was a demonstration that black activists

were invested in bourgeois norms of individual self-improvement, these norms

helped to create a potent protest culture. Even Elizabeth McHenry’s groundbreaking

study of black intellectual clubs largely focused on them as evidence of literary devel

opment. The transatlantic origins of the elevation impulse, though, have not been

explored.1

This article finds a previously hidden explanation that helps explain why early black

reformers focused on building intellectual dubs and developing ideas about education

and intellectual uplift: because, thanks to the work of black intellectuals like Prince

Saunders, Baron de Vastey and others, many associated the ‘elevation’ impulse with

a militant and transnational discourse with its roots in the Haitian Revolution, 'trans

national networks of intellectual exchange that spanned the Atlantic - with Haiti as a

crucial node - shaped the ways in which black intellectuals saw their project of build

ing educational institutions while fighting slavery. Recently theorists and historians

have explored the relationship between the Haitian Revolution and Western intellec

tual history, opening up a counter-narrative of the Enlightenment centred squarely on

Lhc legacy of black resistance and rebellion. They have recast the foundation of Western

intellectual traditions by demonstrating Haitian influence on everything from the uni-

versalism of Jacobin revolutionary politics to the intricacies of Hegel’s masler/slave

dialectic. Unfortunately some of this work has suffered from a lack of material evi

dence. But in African-American appropriation of Haitian ideas of education, we

can see one consequence of the intellectual interaction with Haiti. Historians, in

their haste to rediscover the importance of the Revolution itself, have also neglected

to study the interaction with the government of Haiti that continued throughout

the nineteenth century, long after the revolutionary era ended. A number of early

black intellectuals explicitly looked to Haiti - and sometimes travelled there -

while they built the clubs, lyceums and intellectual organizations that set the contours

for American abolitionism and black secular civil society. The Haitian government,

through its support of people like Prince Saunders, played a role in this intellectual

exchange (see Figure 1). But more important were the ways in which stories about


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Slavery ó- Abolition


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278 Peter Wirzbicki

the Haitian experience and Lhe symbolic pull of Haiti were central to black ideas about

education. African-American intellectuals and Haitian state builders were thus parti

cipating in a set of shared assumptions, dialogues and discourses about the purpose ofeducation and black intellectual acLivity.2

The Haitian Revolution was a watershed event in American and global history. By

the time the dust had settled, some of the mosL exploited slaves in the Western Hemi

sphere had seized control of Trance’s richest colony, had forever abolished chattel

slavery and had declared all residents black, regardless of their skin colour. To many

white Americans, what they achieved was unthinkable, and could only be understood

as a monstrous event, a gothic calamity representing the worst revolutionary excesses

and an unholy reversal of racial hierarchies. As Frederick Douglass remembered it,

white Americans saw the Haitian Revolution as ‘a very hell of horrors’. Throughout

the antebellum period, conservatives would hurl the spectre of ‘race war’, which the

memory of the Haitian Revolution evoked, at white and black abolitionists who ques

tioned slavery.3

If the spectre of the Haitian Revolution haunted white Americans, black intellectuals

in America celebrated it and the sLale that it produced. Scholars are increasingly aware

of the hidden ways in which information about the Haitian Revolution travelledthroughout the black Atlantic, inspiring slaves in Jamaica, freed people in Philadelphia

and Creole intellectuals in New Orleans. Black Americans in the Early Republic weie

particularly interested in the legacy of the revolution. Haitian emigration, which

served as a radical contrast to Lhc white-run colonization societies, was one manifes

tation of this interest in Haiti. As the black newspaper lhe Rights of All explained

if any have a disposition to leave this country, why not emigrate, either to Canada or

the beautiful island of Hayti... We do not ask the Colonization Society to provide a

home for us, we can do it for ourselves, when necessary, and a far better one than

they have to offer.

Black thinkers saw Haiti as a source of black pride, proof of what people of African

descent were capable of. As Elijah Forte, a black activist in Cincinnati, told an audience

in 1831, ‘I .et the world boast of her Alfreds, her Fredericks and her Washingtons - ours

shall be the boast of a Boyer’, referencing the leader of the Haitian state. Southern

slaves - like those on a slave ship bound from Virginia to New Orleans who unsuccess-ftilly rebelled hoping Lo ‘proceed to Hayti’ - viewed the nation as a beacon of liberty. 4

But African-Americans were interested in more than simply the pride that the

Haitian Revolution evoked, or Haiti as a site of emigration. While historians have

focused on how Haiti’s independence and abolition of slavery impacted black

thought in America, they have not considered Lhe degree to which the existing govern

mental institutions and forms of state inspired black thinkers. Haiti’s educational

system would emerge as one of the aspects of the post-revolutionary state that most

compelled African-Americans. Ironically, it was exactly because of the racism of

European elites, who purposefully isolated Haiti, that Lhe nation developed its own

educational institutions. The Haitian educational system was forged in a context of

official international isolation and Lhe constant threat of re-invasion. Unlike much


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Slavery & Abolition 279

of South America and Catholic Europe, Haiti lacked experienced religious orders to

take control of their schools. ’Hie Vatican, unwilling to fully recognize the Haitian

state, refused to establish an independent diocese in Haiti until 1860. In the wordsof Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the lack of experienced Catholic educators ‘crippled the

Haitians’ chances’ of easily building an educational system on the model of France.

Although the early constitution of the newly emancipated staLc had mandated the cre

ation of central public schools, given the turmoil following the division of Haiti, few

were founded."

By 1815, though, Haitians were ready to begin constructing schools. In the years

after independence, Haiti had temporarily splintered into two states - a monarchy

in the north led by Henry Christophe and a republic in the south led by Alexandre

Pétion. Both leaders attempted to creaLc public education systems. Christophe's

efforts arc better documented, partly because he invited British teachers to oversee

the schools. It would be his vision of educational development that would have the

greatest influence on African-American thinkers. Christophe, in the words of a histor

ian of Haitian education, ‘wanted to build his kingdom on military strength, Negro

sovereignty, and good principles of education’. BriLish missionaries were impressed

by the ‘great vigour’ with which Christophe founded schools in Cape Henry, Portde Paix, Sans Souci and Gonaives. By 1821, there were at least 11 public schools, edu

cating 1110 students in reading, writing and arithmetic, and an advanced ‘Royal

Academy’ teaching Latin, French, English, grammar and geography. About 72,000 stu

dents attended schools at some point during Christophe’s reign, a remarkable achieve

ment for a group whose parents had been almost universally barred from reading and

writing. One white professor proudly wmle that the schools demonstrated that ‘the

Omnipotent has freely given to all the nations in the world the powers of intellect’."

Christophe invested in education for explicitly political reasons, claiming that the

schools would safeguard Haitian sovereignty. The official justification for spending

scarce Haitian resources on schools was that education was needed to combat the

increased belligerence from France. The Bourbon Restoration had both brought

peace to war-torn Europe and empowered many cx-planters in Paris, who were

noisily advocating the re-conquest of the former colony, hoping to take advantage

of a divided Haiti and the momentum of European counter-revolution. As rumours

of French spies spread across the countryside, Christophe legitimately worried that

the French monarchy was plotting to restore control over Haiti. When the French

envoy to the island was discovered with papers indicating that the French did not con

sider Haiti to be truly independent and were hoping to reassert French control, Chris

tophe’s worst fears were validated. According to Baron de Vastey, a former slave and an

adviser to the HaiLian government, Christophe figured that the French would try to

subdue Haiti ‘by intrigue and corruption', and so ‘Henry saw more than ever the

importance of making Lhe people acquainted with their rights and their duties; and

he determined upon diffusing the light of instruction throughout all classes of his sub

jects.’ To the Haitian public, Christophe and allied intellectuals argued that education

would safeguard their freedom against the French, by providing concrete skills and,

mote importantly, tying Haitians to the national state and its anti-slavery mission/


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280 Peter Wirzbicki

Reaching out to British allies like Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforcc, and

with the aid of the African-American school-master Prince Saunders, Christophe built

a number of British schools along the Lancasterian model in northern Haiti. Theschools were run in English, both a savvy tactic to win British abolitionist support

and a cultural blow against the French. By teaching their citizens English, the

schools would encourage the Haitians to fed like a different people than their

former colonial masters. Christophe, in the words of a British travel writer, ‘was

anxious to abolish everything that indicated their former possession of the island’.

British volunteers were recruited to move to Haiti and serve as teachers. It was also

interesting that the King chose explicitly to use the Lancasterian model. This was a

system of education in which, rather than rely exclusively on one teacher, the more

advanced studenLs were tasked with passing on information to younger students,

ideally creating a collaborative and engaged learning environment. The system was

popular among Atlantic radicals, especially Latin American revolutionary Simon

Bolivar, who invited Joseph Lancaster to Venezuela in the 1820s to set up schools in

the newly liberated Latin American nation.*1

Not only would these schools prevent French intrigue, but Christophe intended that

they send a clear message about die intellectual capabilities of black Haitians. According to the Haitian King, ihc schools would ‘prove to the impious, by facts and by

examples, that the blacks, like the whites, are men'. The acquisition of knowledge

was a crucial component of a transformation from being enslaved and degraded to

being ‘restored to the dignity of man, and to society’. Boosters of the educational

system explicitly linked its success to that of Haiti’s revolution, declaring that,

unlike in France, where revolution had led to anarchy and barbarism, ‘the revolution

in out country ... has inclined us to civilisation and the light of knowledge’.g

By demonstrating to the French and British publics that they had created a success

ful civilization, Haitian propagandists were laying claim to the status of an enlightened

nalion. In Enlightenment thought, a group’s humanity was directly tied to the

members’ ability to reason, and therefore a successful educational system was defini

tive proof'of human equality. Christophe, who admired the enlightened leadership of

Frederick the Great, was very much in this Enlightenment-era tradition. On the otheT

side, French cx-colonists, who hoped to convince the monarchy to re-conquer Haiti,

were arguing LhaL the lack of education in Haiti proved the disorderly state of the

nation, and justified French intervention. A quality education system would earn

the world’s respect and forestall European invasion, Haitian intellectuals hoped.

‘After having established our rights by the sword’, one wrote, ‘we acquire a new

lustre in the eyes of the world, when we defend them by the pen’.10

While one part of Christophe’s educational theory faced outward, to prove black

intellectual capability to a sceptical white world, ihe oilier hall looked inward, to

create institutions and educated citizens who would empower the Haffian state and

its anti-slavery mission. Christophe joined a long list of nation-builders who used

schools as a mechanism to create national communities, but in his case the schools

would build a specifically and explicitly anti-slavery community. From the schools,

Christophe declared, ‘will proceed a Tace of men capable of defending by their


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knowledge and talents those rights so long opposed by tyrants'. Much like later apostles

of democratic education in America, Christophe claimed to value education, at least

partly’, because it was necessary to produce proud and free citizens. In this he was afar cry from his successor, Jean-Pierre Boyer, who would allow Christophe’s schools

to fall into disrepair and was supposed to have believed that ‘to extend education

was to sow Lhe seed of revolution1. Christophe ran an authoritarian state, and his com

mitment to democracy can be reasonably questioned. But his hatred of slavery cannot

be. Moreover, the fact thaL Cliristophe sought to justify his educational system as a Lool

that would create an anti-slavery citizenry demonstrates what he thought his own citi

zens desired/1

Particularly important to Lhe creation of these ideas about education was

Christophe’s aide Pompée ValcnLin Vastey. Vastey, who was made a nobleman in

Christophe’s kingdom, has received the most scholarly attention for his anti

colonialism, as his Colonial System Unveiled is rightfully seen as a classic in early anti

imperialist rhetoric. Connected to his anLi-colonialism was his fierce advocacy for an

educational policy in Haiti that would demonstrate the intellectual prowess of

African people. Ilis essay Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites, printed in 1817 in

French and then quickly translated into English, was one of the earliest and strongestarguments against scientific racism published by a black writer. Quoting scientific

and philosophical authorities like Buffon and Montesquieu, and expressing solidarity

with ‘500 Millions of Rlack, Yellow, and Red Men, scattered over the Globe’, who

were claiming their rights, Vastey Lraced the history of Africa to show its early leadership

in the arts and sciences. A second pamphlet, Political Remarks on Some French Works and

Newspapers, continued his ruthless assault on the ex-colonialists, arguing that with the

arrival of schools and academics in Haiti, Haitians were proving French ideas of black

inequality incorrect. ‘It is by Lhe cultivation of letters, arts, and science alone, that we

shall be able to excite Lhe moral world against the enemies of humanity,’ he wrote. A

third essay on the history of the Haitian Revolution included an appendix listing the

schools now operating in Haiti.u

In the end, Christophe’s goal of a modern educational system in Haiti was not suc

cessful in his home country. After Christophe’s death, Boyer, who took control of a

united Haiti, declined to invest in education, and British travellers were disappointed

to see old schools used as barracks. Vastey was arrested, and William Wilberforce hadto plead with the new government for clemency for the Haitian writer. If momentarily

defeated, Christophe’s idea of black empowerment Lhrough education would soon

reappear in America, where it would be central to Lhe burgeoning black civil

society. The characteristics that marked his pedagogical theory - that intellectual

aspiration would prove black capability to an outside world, that it would cTeale

proud and free citizens who would resist slavery, and that it was a project that reflected

the hopes of Africans throughout the Atlantic - would be powerfiilly reflected in later

African-American discourses. Most important, Haitian thought created a clear link

between black ideas of education and aspirations to egalitarian universalism.1 ’

lhe debates about the place of education in post-revolutionary Haiti exposed Lhe

intellectual hopes of Haitian revolutionaries, but might have done little to influence


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282 Peter Mrzbicki

fer away Boston and Philadelphia had it not been for the extraordinary African-Amer

ican traveller Prince Saunders. Characteristic of the confident culturally adaptable

black travellers of the Atlantic world, Saunders moved across and beLwecn national,imperial and linguistic borders, revealing the transnational horizons of black activists

in the early nineteenth century. From 180S to 1825, Saunders travelled between worlds,

starting out among dour black-clad New England ministers, moving to the elegance of

London aristocratic society and ending up casting his lot with ex-slave revolutionaries

in Haiti. In the early 1820s, he did more than any previous American individual to

connecL the experiences of the Haitian republic with black communities across the

Northern seaboard. At the same time he was tireless in his efforts to create black edu

cational institutions, making a concrete legacy out of the uplift ideology that he took

from Haiti.11

In 1808, the young Saunders was recommended to famed UniLarian minister

William Ellery Channing, to assist with the ‘elevation of the colored people’, in

Boston. Saunders’ father, Cuff, had been a former slave and a Revolutionary war

veteran while his moLhcr, Phyllis, was born in Guinea and broughL as a slave to

New England. Born free and baptized in Lebanon, Connecticut, Saunders had lived

in Vermont before becoming a teacher in Colchester, Connecticut, and enrolling atthe Moor’s Charity School at Dartmouth College. He soon became a Lcachcr at

Boston’s African School, a poorly funded segregated school on the north slope of

Beacon Hill. Among the overseers of the African School was a while minister

named William Emerson, whose young son Ralph Waldo would one day himself

become a prominent anti-slavery voice. In 1815, Saunders convinced a wealthy

white merchant, Abiel Smith, to donate $4000 to the school, which would be re

named Lhe Smith School, and would educate most of the free black leadership of

the city in the antebellum years. Saunders quickly rose to a position of leadership in

the small black community of Boston: he was active in the African Masonic Society

and helped found the Belles Lettres Society, a model íot the later black literary organ

izations he would lead and he gave regular public addresses on behalf of black edu

cation. He was a prominent supporter of Paul Cuffee, the black merchant from

nearby New Bedford who was then crafting plans for free blacks to emigrate to

Africa, arranging for Cuffee to speak in Boston and navigating the complex politics

associated with accepting British aid on the eve of the War of 1812. He was even briefly engaged to Cuffee’s daughter.15

Three years later, in 1815, Saunders travelled to England to meet with British aboli

tionist William WiTberforcc. On Wilberforce’s suggestion, Saunders sailed to Haiti,

arriving in early lRlfi. Ostensibly, he was to help introduce vaccination and to build

schools on the Lancaslerian model. Henry Christophe was immediately attracted to

Saunders, writing to Thomas Clarkson that Saunders gave him 'great satisfaction’.

Saunders became fiercely loyal to Christophe and an adviser to the king, assisting

with the construction of the educational system and running at least one Haitian

school. He brought the smallpox vaccination to Haiti - itself a potent symbol of

Enlightenment aspirations - and Lraincd doctors in Haiti in the new medical technol

ogy. Given his role, he almost certainly met and collaborated with Vastey. Travelling


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back lo England on official Haitian government business, he became a minor celebrity

in aristocratie circles {supposedly the British mistook his first name for a title and

assumed he was royalty), as he successfully helped to recruit British teachers. He befriended the popular author Amelia Opie, his parties attracted Dukes and he was

a regular guest of Lhc Countess of Cork. When snubbed by a white American lady

in London, Saunders had the pleasure of informing her that he could not have

eaten with her anyway since, ‘1 am engaged to breakfast with the Prince Regent, this

morning.’ Meanwhile he published his Haytiun Papers, which presented a number

of official documents from Christ ophe’s regime in an attempt to prove that wise

laws could be written by ‘all black men, or men of colour’16

Despite his success among the British aristocracy, Saunders was developing a sense

of black identity and solidarity that would inform the rest of his life. Even his early

career in New England, when he seemed perfectly willing to seek British help in

order to create a black colony in Africa in the midst of the War of 1812, suggesLs he

valued his citizenship in an imagined black Atlantic community far more than he

did loyalty to any particular nation-state. Much as Christophe conceived of an edu

cation system that would modernize the state of Haiti, so Saunders saw the develop

ment of intellectual institutions as something that would aid the ‘descendents ofAfricans, my brethren’, achieve their rightfiil place in the world. British reactionaries

were horrified, in 1816, to hear Saunders belittle European monarchs while celebrating

the Haitian government which would ‘subvert the relations of the western world as at

present constituted, and give Africa its natural rank, if not superiority, in the scale of

mankind’. Haiti was not recognized by Britain, and, in the reactionary climate after the

Napoleonic wars, slave-owners accused Saunders and others of ‘delivering] inflam

matory harangues at meetings of a motley assemblage of white, black, and tawney-

coloured people, collected together at a tavern; the direct tendency of which is to

excite insurrection in our West India Islands.’ In the conservative imagination, Saun

ders’ anti-slavery work evoked the spectre of Paineite plebian radicalism, mixed up

with slave rebellion and the reversal of racial hierarchies. 1'

In the appendix to his IJaytian Papers, an unfairly forgotten gem of early black

radicalism, Saunders demonstrated that he shewed his own life as embedded within

Atlantic flows of knowledge and power. The end of the slave trade, he argued, could

be found in the long fall-out of the French Revolution. He described the devastation

of the revolution as partly a form of divine punishment as ‘Europe, the oppressor of

Africa and America, saw itself in turn covered with crimes and inundated with the

blood of her own Sons’. Moreover the consequences of the European upheaval were

unabashedly good: out of the crucible of revolution had come ‘the freedom of

nations’ and Lhe reassertion of black contribution to ‘the pursuits of commerce, of

science, and of arL’. Praising Lhe British philanthropists who had ended the slave

trade, and referencing implicitly the Haitian Revolution, he declared a ‘new era

arises for Africa’. Saunders drew on common understandings of the inevitable rise

and decay of civilizations to argue that Africans were not inherently deficient, but

were only slowly coming out of a dark age, much as Europe recently had. In a remark

able statement that encapsulated how the Haitian Revolution had created new


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284 Peter Wirzbicki

imaginarles and ideological horizons for black activisLs like himself, Saunders wrote

that ‘the light of knowledge follows the impulse of revolutions, and travels, succes

sively, over the surface of the globe’.18If a new day was dawning for African people throughout the Atlantic world, Saun

ders admitted that they still had powerful enemies. Too many Europeans believed that

blacks were inherently inferior. Tn response, Saunders exhorted, black leaders must

‘devote ourselves to the cultivation of letters, of arts and sciences, which develope

intellect'. Black intellectual achievement would be the first sign of the 'new era that

the Haitian Revolution had inaugurated.1 ‘

Coming back to America, Saunders brought with him Haitian ideas about edu

cation from Haiti, and a desire to emulate Christophers investment in schools and

otheT institutions of learning. By May 1818, Saunders was back in New England

where his exploits among the British aristocracy earned him the moniker ‘the cele

brated African’ in newspaper accounts. He told a while minister, William Bentley of

Salem, that the ‘jealousies around’ Christophe had disappointed him. Christophe,

apparently, had disapproved of the expenses that Saunders racked up in England,

and briefly dismissed him. But his two interests - support for the state of Haiti and

of developing black intellectual institutions - remained. The Salem Gazette reportedthat Saunders, having arrived in the Massachusetts seaport town, was engaging in

‘measures for improving the intellectual and moral conditions of his race’. That

month, Bentley reported that Saunders and the black minister Nathaniel Paul were

attempting to raise money to ‘encourage the education of Africans for the ministry’.

Tn Boston, newspapers printed accounts of Saunders’ speech on black education along

side reviews of Vastey’s Observations on the Black and Whites. By July Saunders had

reprinted Haytian Papers, giving American audiences access to Christophe’s proclama

tions on education.20

Saunders had the most influence in Philadelphia, the northern city with one of the

largest and most settled black communities. On 30 September 1818, he addressed the

newly formed ‘Augustine Society for the Education of People of Colour’. Although

Northern free blacks had long expressed interest in elevation and education, the

founding of the Augustine Society marked a new phase in the maturity and develop

ment of black intellectual institutions. Led by the el he of Philadelphia black men,

including Rev. John Gloucester, James Forten and Samuel Cornish, it was the firstof the major black-run literary and intellectual groups, and helped set the tone for

the dozens Lhat would follow throughout the country.

Saunders was asked to speak at an opening event, and his speech, prinLcd along with

a copy of the group’s constitution, was sold as a pamphlet foT 12V2 ccnLs at Matthew

Carey’s famous bookstore. As in his earlier writings, Saunders was impressed by the

vagaries of history, how great civilizations rose and fell, an important point for

someone who believed that now was the time for Africa to rise. There were, he

claimed, three such places in the world where ‘enlightened men’ were creating civiliza

tions worthy of respect. The first was in Europe, the second was in the ‘northern and

eastern sections of our country’, where the Augustine Society was now engaged and the

third was The island of Hayti’. Saunders saw post-revolutionary Haiti as one of the


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Slavery à- Abolition 285

central sites of intellectual modernity. This statement was of crucial importance as iL

linked Haiti as a place of inspiration to Lhc founding of the Augustine Society, which

was tasked with emulating the intellectual production of the Haitian people.Months after he presided over the inauguration of the Augustine Society, Saunders

surfaced again, this time as one of the first black northerners to speak out in favour of

emigration to Haiti. Saunders, the former adviser to Henry Christophe, was thus

present at the beginning of both the push for Haitian emigration and the creation

of one of the most important intellectual clubs in early African-American life. Just

two years earlier, the white-led American Colonization Society had begun Lo advocate

for the colonization of free blacks to Africa. Philadelphia black leaders, including those

who would form the Augustine Society, had presided over a massive meeting in 1817

that had decisively rejected the white-led Colonization Society. It was in this context

that Saunders presented Haiti as an alternative to Liberian Colonization at a meeting

of the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Without naming

the American Colonization Society directly, he expressed his distrust of white coloni-

zationists whom ‘observation and experience might teach us to beware’. Emigration to

Haiti, Saunders aTgued, was far more practical than colonization to Liberia and, unlike

Africans, the black authorities in Haiti were ‘themselves desirous of receiving emigrants from this country’ More important, though, emigration to Haiti would serve

to re-unite the warring factions in Haiti, turning the divided nation into a beacon

for the ‘subsequent improvement and elevation of the African race’. Saunders

framed this emigration in the language of religious redemption, casting African-

American emigrants as biblical ‘peace-makers', who would be divine ‘instruments of

the pacification and reunion of the Haytian people’. Saunders was deploying language

similar to boosters of the American Colonization Society, but inverting its purpose,

turning the rhetoric of divine redemption into something that would strengthen a

black republic forged in slave rebellion.”

In 1820, Saunders was back in Haiti, arriving just in time to see the collapse of the

regime of his patron Henry Christophe, who killed himself following a stroke in

October and a coup among his inner guards. Saunders would continue to travel

back and forth between Philadelphia and Haiti for the better part of the decade, but

he would never have as good relations with Christophe’s successor, Jean-Pierre

Royer. Particularly upsetting was the fact that Boyer did not share Christophe’s passion fur building a national school system. Writing to Thomas Clarkson in 1823,

SaundeTs complained Lhal ‘the numerous schools and academies which were estab

lished throughout Lhc King’s dominions are abolished’. An outraged Saunders reported

that Haitian officers from the South believed that ‘education must not be too general;

if it is ... there will be nobody lo work’. He continued to work for Haitian emigration

though, and, after 1825, spent the resL of his life in Haiti, working for Boyer despite the

mutual distrust that marked their relationship. When he died in 1839, American

obituaries even claimed (probably erroneously) that he had been named, at different

times, as the Haitian ALlomcy General and Lhc ‘Bishop’ of Haiti,*'

Other black activists in America soon look the baton from Saunders, and as they

continued his campaign for black education, they did not forget the importance of


13/24

286 Peter Wirzbicki

the Haitian example. The Board of Managers of the Haytian Emigration Society, for

instance encouraged possible emigrants to ‘diligently attend to the education of

your children’, seeing education and Haitian emigration as linked aspects of blackuplift. When advocating Haitian emigration, as William Watkins did in 1825, black

activists declared that the value of Haiti lay not only in its example of slave rebellion

and black agency, but also because it was a ‘a republic in which the arts and sciences

begin to flourish’. Like Saunders, Watkins saw Haiti as a crucial site of intellectual

creativity, one that proved racist assertions of black inferiority incorrect. Many

black thinkers also continued to value education as a project whose importance lay

in how it would improve conditions for the entire community of transatlantic black

activists. ‘F.A.’, a wriLer from Boston, argued that in education ‘the prime object is

to give elevation and happiness to our coloured population’, whether they stayed in

the USA, emigrated lo Haili or were colonized to Africa.

This link between the example of Haiti and the need for elevation among black

Northerners was strengthened by David Walker, the most important African-Ameri

can intellectual before 1830. He dedicated his famous Appeal to ‘coloured people of

the world’, evidence of his transnational identity. He felt especially close to Haiti,

declaring the state to he 'the glory of the blacks and terror of tyrants’. But while hissense of an African idenliLy lhat spanned the Atlantic is well known, his place as a

booster of black education and intellectual development is less well known. In addition

to calling for black resistance and even rebellion, Walker argued repeatedly for

increased black attention to education and personal improvement. In his first major

speech, in 1828, Walker had argued that white Americans ‘delight in our degra

dation ... glory in keeping us ignorant’. Walker saw the solution in the creation of

institutions that could unite the efforts of black people throughout the USA and

encourage education. 'There ought to be a spirit of emulation and inquiry among

us,’ Walker wrote, declaring that such an emphasis on education would ‘ultimately

resulL in rescuing us from an oppression, unparalleled, I had almost said, in the

annals of the world’. Lack of education, both intellectual and religious, would,

Walker told the audience, produce more scoundrels like the black man who had just

colluded to defraud 'the government of our brethren, the Haydens’." '

It was David Walker’s masterpiece, his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World y

that frilly revealed the radical extent of his ideas about black intellectual life and theway that he linked it wilh Haiti. Walker divided his pamphlet into ‘articles’. The

first declared black oppression to be caused by slavery, while the second was subtitled

‘our wretchedness in consequence of ignorance’. Haiti, which could never be subdued

by ‘the combined forces of the whole world’ demonstrated that ‘ignorance and treach

ery ... are not the natural elements of Lhe blacks, as the Americans try to make us

believe’. White Americans, Walker charged, ‘keep us in the most death-like ignorance

by keeping us from all source of information’. For Walker, few concepts were as

mutually reinforcing as ‘ignorance’ and ‘tyranny’. Educated people - ‘of good sense

and learning’ - would never submit to slavery, but would, like the Haitians, rebel

instead. In Walker’s calculation, then, black elevation was not only essential for

people of African descent to reach Lheir full potential and dignity; it was also a


14/24


direct blow against white oppression. ‘For colored people to acquire learning in this

country’, Walker wrote, ‘makes tyrants quake and tremble on their sandy foun

dation ... Lhc bare name of educating the coloured people, scares our cruel oppressorsalmost to death’. Walker’s belief - that white Americans would treat black education as

a direct assaulL on their power - was demonstrated as well, as white mobs violently

destroyed black schools in New Hampshire, Canterbury, Connecticut and elsewhere/”

Increased interest in the works of Baron de Vastey’s demonstrated a growing audi

ence for news on the linked causes of education and the state of Haiti. The late 1810s

and early 1820s saw the translation and republication of many of Vastey’s works in

American and British newspapers, which turned the Haitian intellectual into a well-

known figure among those interested in black education. Newspapers as diverse as

the New York Daily Advertiser, the City of Washington Gazelle, and the Rhode Island

American published reviews and excerpts of Vaslcy’s work. The most important

notice of Vastey’s writings came in an 1821 article in the North American Review, argu

ably the most prominent and respected intellectual journal in Lhc early republic. White

supporters of the Colonizationist movement quoted Vasley as evidence that the slaves

disliked their condition. And during the national turmoil surrounding the Missouri

Compromise, Vastey was cited by prominent anti-slavery pamphleteers as anexample of both the intelligence of Africans and even Lhc jusLice of slave revolt.

Even elites like the American Philosophical Society were stocking Vastey’s books.

Since Vastey had been so concerned with Haitian education, the spread of his works

helped draw attention to the issue of black education. Freedom’s Journal, the pioneer

ing black newspaper, frequently ran lengthy excerpts from Vastey’s writings. In one

they published Vastey’s historical works that were intended to prove that, in Vastey’s

words, ‘Africa was the cradle of the arts and sciences’. Another Freedom’s Journal

article republished Vastey’s reply to the French colonialists, an article that emphasized

French brutality in pre-revolutionary Haiti/'

Along with Vastey, African-American newspapers and intellectuals reported eagerly

on the development of education in the black republic. In 1828, Freedom’s Journal

reported, perhaps a bit optimistically, that in Haiti, thanks to government support

and the construction of common schools and a medical school, ‘education is almost

at every man’s door’. In 1837, the Colored American published a leLLer from office of

the Haytian Abolition Society, which described ‘no less than fifteen male and femaleschools in this city, also a national college, in which sciences, languages, drawing,

music, etc. are taught’. The paper commented that this demonstration of Haitian

educational development proved that blacks were as capable as European and T-atin

American governments at running states. As late as 1847, the National Era, an aboli

tionist paper with a large black readership, was fascinated by the example of Haitian

schools and reported on the crowded’ schools which were rapidly increasing’ in the

black republic/8

Black Americans had been interested in self-education for as long as there had been

free communities, but they eagerly latched onto the example of Haitian schools, taking

them as a model for their own activity. Thanks to the work of Saunders and Vastey,

Haiti had become a symbol of black genius among Northern African-Americans.


15/24

288 Peter Wtrzbicki.

This image of Haiti was intended to disprove while racism, to demonstrate black

ability for civilization and, simultaneously, through celebrating Haiti as an aspirational

model, to encourage black intellectuals to emulate the accomplishments of theirHaitian forbearers. Writing about Haiti, one New York black activist wrote that

through education, in the words of a New York activist, ‘the tyrant’s spell will be

broken’. Another writer pointed out that while American blacks were excluded from

white schools, people of African descent in Haiti, having access to good education,

were ‘not as inferior to any ofhis fairer brethren’. African-American observers contin

ued to show deep interest in the state ol Haiti’s education system. When hundreds of

Americans emigrated to Haiti in 1825, advocates like Belfast Burton made a point that

the government was preparing to build schools for the emigrants. Three years later, in

1828, Freedom's Journal advocated that ‘schools be established in every city, town, and

village, of the Republic’. Comparing Haiti to ancienL Sparta, the author argued that a

national system of education would ensure Haitian liberty and would allow Haiti to 'in

a few years ... take her rank among the nations of Lhe earth, respecLed and

honoured’. 9

The most remarkable illustration of how black thinkers continued to link the cause

of Haiti and the cause of education in America came in 1829, when the Rights of All, a New York newspaper, wrote a lengthy commentary on an educational proclamation by

Henry Christophe. The author began by describing the sorry state of education and

intellectual development available to free blacks in the NorLh. ‘Knowledge is power’,

the Rights of All wrote, deploying a trite phrase given new meaning in the context

of support for the education system in the revolutionary black republic. ‘Let our

coloured population once become as learned’ as while people, Lhe newspaper declared,

and the ‘tyrants’ will lose their power over black Northerners. Christophe’s proclama

tion, printed underneath the commentary, demonstrated powerfully the continued

interest that black boosters of education had in connecting their arguments to the

state of Haiti and the legacy of Henry ChrisLophe’s policies. Just as black Northerners

admired Haitians foT having overthrown slavery, the Rights of All asked LhaL they

admiTe the educational policy of the Haitian government.'1'1

T.ike Christophe, many black educaLors in America embraced Lhe Lancastrian

method of education. In 1839, for instance, a young Samuel Ringgold Ward was

hired to teach in the ‘Coloured Lancasterian School’, in Poughkeepsie. Tn 1828,

Isaiah Degrass, a black teenager wrote a letter to the New York Manumission

Society thanking them for running a school ‘conducted on the Lancasterian system’,

and claiming that the school was responsible for the ‘improvement of the scholars’.

The system was also used by the African Tree School in New York City, which gradu

ated a number of important black intellectuals, including Alexander Crummell, James

McCune Smith and Henry Highland Garnet. The Lancasterian System, in which older

students taught the younger ones, may have appealed to black teachers both because it

maximized scarce resources and because it allowed black students to take a certain

amount of control over their own education. More interestingly, some scholars have

speculated that it may have appealed to African-Americans because it was similar to

covert styles of learning practiced under slavery. In Louisiana, a state with significant


16/24

Slavery & Abolition 28‘J

cultural and linguistic ties to Haiti, black children in St Lan (fry Parish went to a school

modelled along the Lancasterian method. A historian of these schools speculates that

Lancasterian methods were popular because ‘the structure supports self-teachingamong students’ and was ‘reminiscent of the clandestine schools in other parts of

Louisiana’. A direct connection, of course, is hard to prove conclusively, but the fact

that both Haitian leaders and American blacks reached for similar pedagogical

methods, one associated with slaves illegally teaching themselves to read, reveals the

radical contexts and possibilities behind black education.31

By the late 1820s, the exhortation of leaders like Saunders and Walker, and newspa

pers like the Freedom's Journal to replicate Haiti’s educational system had successfully

positioned questions of education and elevation as central to black politics. Although

pedagogical questions interested many Americans in this period, African-Americans

had special reasons to be interested. White Americans locked them out of the

normal means of education, and then used their ensuing lack of education as evidence

for why black Northerners did not deserve equal rights - including the right to edu

cation. Both public and private places for intellectual development were closed to

black Northerners. As a writer to the Freedom’s Journal exclaimed ‘Conscious of the

unequal advantages enjoyed by our children, we feel indignant against tho.se whoare continually vituperating us for the ignorance and degradation of our people’.

Writers for black newspapers grimly tallied the cities that segregated or ilat-oul

banned black education. Private lyceums and libraries remained segregated through

out the antebellum period. William C. Nell reported that in Boston ‘large audiences in

Lyceum lectures have been thrown almost into spasms by the presence of one colored

man in their midst’.3'

In response, black leaders formed independent intellectual clubs that flourished in

the 1820s and 1830s. In Philadelphia, as we have seen, there was the Augustine Edu

cational Society, founded in 1818 because ‘prejudices, powerful as they are unjust, have

reared to impede our progress in the paths of science and of virtue’. In 1827, a black

traveller in Boston visited the ‘Debating Club’, which consisted of about 20 black

members. Later would come the ‘Boston Mutual Lyceum’, which was organized in

1833 to give classes on reading, writing and math, and which debated topics such as

‘what are the best means to adopt, to remove the prejudice which exists against the

people of color?’ In New York, the Phoenixonian Society, organized in the 1830s,was the most prominent, and included such future leaders as Samuel Ringgold

Ward, Alexander Crummell and James McCune Smith. In Boston, the Adelphic

Union, beginning in 1837, would be one of the most successfid, lasting for at least a

decade and bringing together some of the most important white and black intellectuals

and activists of the region. In her exhaustive study of black educational institutions,

Dorothy Porter identified at least 46 such clubs, in cities as large as Manhattan and

as small as Schenectady. By the 1850s, even the West Coast could boast the

San Francisco Athenaeum, a literary association with an 800-volume library.33

The Haitian Revolution, and the need to emulate the Haitian state, was one of the

most popular topics of discussion at these black intellectual dubs. Boston’s Adelphic

Union, for instance, may have heard from the elite of the region’s thinkers {including


17/24

290 Peter Wirzbicki

prominent Transcendentalists and abolitionists) but the members were most attracted

to lectures about the I laitian Revolution. In 1838, Thomas Brooks, a black ‘gentleman’

who had been living in Haiti, lectured on the ‘localities, manners, and customs of the place’. Three years later, on 19 January 1841, the members of the black lecture series

heard from white merchant William M. Chace on the ‘Character of Toussaint L’Ouver-

lure’. It was such a popular topic that it was repeated the next year, this time by the

fuLure abolitionist Henry I. Bowditch. The same year, James McCune Smith praised

ToussainL L’Overture as ‘brave and virtuous’ in a lecture in front of the Phoenixonian

Society (renamed the Hamilton Lyceum), in New York City. And black intellectuals

continued Lo praise Henry Christophe’s interest in education. In Frederick Douglass’

newspapers, a correspondent in Haiti reported on the establishment of a university in

Port-All-Prince, adding that education was among the ‘germs wherein lie the future

welfare of Haiti’. As late as 1854, William Wells Brown, in his lecture on the Haitian

Revolution, commended Christophe as ‘Lhe patron of education ... there are still on

the island schools that were founded by him when king’. These intellectual dubs

played crucial roles keeping the memory of the HaiLian Revolution alive in antebellum

black thought.'4'1

These intellectual groups reached a remarkable cross-section of the black population. In border cities like Baltimore, they even embraced Lite enslaved. Frederick

Douglass was admitted Lo the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society while he

was still a slave, despite Lhe fact that it was supposedly open only to free blacks.

Years later he wrote simply, T owe much to the society of these young men.’ In New

Orleans, black and Creole writers even published a journal that drew on Romantic

themes. There was little that challenged pro-slavery ideology as much as slaves

eagerly reading, writing, debating and engaging with the works of famous intellectuals.

Under more direct surveillance and threats, black intellectuals in slave states did not

have the freedom or relative luxuries that their northern counterparts did, and the

reach of these clubs was, no doubt, more circumscribed by white authority in the

South. Still, their existence in slave states, however limited, gives new meaning to

Laurent Dubois’ call to re-examine the ‘intellectual history of the enslaved? 5

Intellectual and material exchange between Haiti and free blacks continued

throughout the period. The Haitian example was, obviously, important first and fore

most at an ideological level to the burgeoning abolition movement. But the impact ofHaiti was material and financial as well as ideological. In 1836, for instance, the

recenLly founded Haylian Abolition Society donaLed two barrels of sugar to Lhe Amer

ican AnLi-Slaverv Society. The ideological importance of HaiLi did not end wiLh the

memory of the revolution itself. Haitian intellectuals, like M. Pierre Rindiere -

who wrote an early history of Haiti - advertised their books for black Americans to

buy, wrote articles for American newspapers and in other ways maintained contact

with the free black North. Black newspapers like Frederick Douglass’ North Star

sent correspondents to Haiti to directly report on its condition.46

The political impulse written into both the concept of elevation and the structure of

anLebdlum intellectual clubs had interesting ramifications for hlack gender norms.

Many male boosters assumed that women’s educational roles were auxiliary to male


18/24


schools, or that women’s institutions would only teach the circumscribed set of skills

associated with classically feminine education like sewing and cooking. But black

women did not accept the limited place offered Lo Lhcm by male leaders, andquickly transformed their literary clubs into venues to debaLe slavery, abolition and

women’s rights. The Female Literary Society of Philadelphia, which was in regular

contact with William Lloyd Garrison, is a well-known example. Tn Boston, Maria

Stewart, a groundbreaking black feminist, played a major part in creating and sustain

ing the elevation ideology in the city (despite often virulent opposition from black

male leadership), arguing that uplift would be a political process that would necessarily

include women. All male-led intellectual clubs were not exclusive. William C. Nell, a

leader of Boston’s Adelphic Union, invited women to address a mixed audience well

before such behaviour was considered normal. Nell admitted that having female

orators was unorthodox when, writing to ask Maria Weston Chapman to speak, he

acknowledged that ‘this is somewhat an unusual, though not an unprecedented

request’, but 'Miss. Crimké’, had already lectured to the Union. It is difficult to under

estimate how radical and dangerous this must have seemed: white women addressing

‘promiscuous’ and biracial audiences. Women’s roles in these intellectual clubs were

contradictory: on one hand, by providing a space for women to practice reading,debating and engaging in the public without male supervision or control, the clubs

fostered a sense of independence and political agency that would inform later black

feminism. On the other hand, black women were often shuttled into separate organ

izations where they were excluded from the processes of leadership formation that

made so many ‘fraternal’ organizations conduits to abolitionist leadership.3'

These clubs were formative places of not just detached intellectual debate but also

political organizing and the creation of radical subjectivities. As one black writer in

Philadelphia explained, ‘soon, indeed, “slavery must fall”, which will be the conse

quence of active and well-organized associations, operating upon public sentiment’.

And so the author, ‘Peterboro’, advocated ‘societies for moral and intellectual improve

ment’ which would hasten abolition. A number of important black leaders, among

them William C. Nell, James McCune Smith and Frederick Douglass had significant

interaction with these organizations as they were becoming politically active. Nell

led the Adelphic Union, Smith was a member of the Phoenixonian Society and Dou

glass had been a member of the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society. Theradical potential of these clubs was illustrated well by Alexander Crummell’s descrip

tion of the New York-based Phoenixonian Literary Society. The group met every

Fourth of July, a day which, for them, evoked the anniversary of New York’s emanci

pation law, not the nation’s independence. Their celebration rejected the chauvinistic

celebrations common to the day and instead met to discuss 'the sublime and beautiful’

in the poetry of Wordsworth. While reading Romantic poetry, they would dream of the

day when they could ‘start an insurrection and free our brethren in bondage’, evidence

of how interlinked intellectual ‘elevation and radical political consciousness were in

the minds of many black intellectuals/’8

The most remarkable illustration of the ways in which the legacy of Haiti affected

antebellum black ideas about intellectual uplift was the 1841 lecture by James


19/24

292 Peter Wirzbicki

I

I■5

I«

!*S

Í

McCune Smith to the New York Stuyvesant Institute. Although the Sluyvcsanl Institute, an incorporated private library on Bleecker Street, was owned by white elites,

it was open to black speakers and black audiences and Smith’s speech was widelyreported in the black press. In the speech, Smith, who had been a member of the Phoe-nixonian Society and would lecture before the Adelphic Union, justified the HaitianRevolution as 'the legitimate fruit of slavery,’ and even declared the massacres of thewhites to be 'the consequences of withholding from men their liberty’. Smith’soverall message was that ‘caste’ inequalities inevitably led to bloody revolution.Drawing explicitly on the work of Baron de Vastey (as would Henry Bibb in hisfamous letters to his old master), Smith demonstrated the rapid intellectual stridesmade by Haitians since slavery. Only in the last three paragraphs did Smith’s politicalagenda become clear, when he described how ihe spiriL of caste was invading

New York. ‘One of the local manifestations’, he told his audience, of the ‘incongruousand undermining influence of caste, was Lhe exclusion of black children from theschools in the city of New York. lv

The clear association that many black intellectuals had with Haiti and with thetransatlantic project of black empowerment demonstrated that the elevation trope

continued to come from a radical perspective. In 1845, for instance, WilliamC. Nell reported on a black Northerner who was denied enLry to Brown Universityand who was preparing instead to move Lo HaiLi. The association of Lhe HailianRevolution with black empowerment and intellectual capability spread amongwhite allies, most notably when Ralph Waldo Emerson, using similar language asPrince Saunders before him, declared that Lhe arrival of ‘such men as Toussaint,and the Haitian heroes’ heralded the arrival of black ‘intellect’ on Lhe worldstage. In a speech in front of the Hamiltonian Lyceum, the black minister AlexanderCrummell quoted this paragraph by Emerson, while arguing why black sludenLsshould seek education. As the Civil War approached, black Northerners and theirallies continued to associate the rise of Haiti with black demonstrations of intellectual development.4"

Writing in 1818, the Haitian intellectual Baron de Vastey liad argued that the veryfact of Haiti’s independence would itself change European thought. ‘Is not our inde

pendence an object most interesting Lo Europe, most worthy of aLLracling the attention

of the philosopher, and the admiration of mankind?’ he asked. Vastey was correct:Haiti’s success did demonstrate the possibility of an egaliLarian universalism, the

promise that ‘happiness and knowledge may be diffused throughout the earth’, evenif mosL Americans and conservative Europeans daied not face this prospect openly,instead repressing lhe history of slave revolt under ever-more fantastic narratives of

barbarism and massacre. Not only did the memory of the Revolution itself - inter preted variously as catastrophe or heroic example - shape imaginations and disruptracial narratives throughout the Atlantic world, but, thanks to the efforts of activistslike Prince Saunders and others, the Haitian example inspired those in the Northernstates who were creating the concrete institutions that would educate the black abolitionists who attacked American slaver}'.41


20/24

Notes


|1] [oanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slaver)': Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New Englanil,

1780-1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 257. Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten

Readers: Recovering ihc Lost History of African-American Literary Societies (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2(102); Frederick Cooper, 'Elevating the Race: The Social Thought of

Black Leaders, 1827-50’, American Quarterly 24, no. 5 (1972): 606 - 7; Patrick Rael, Black Iden

tity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

2002), 124-30; Stephen Kantrowitz, More than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a

White Republic, 1829-1889 (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 122-71.

[2] Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel , Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pitts

burgh Press, 2009); Laurent Dubois, 'An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual

History of the Erench Atlantic’, Social History 31, no. 1 (2006): 1-4; Domenico Losurdo, Lib

eralism: A Counter-History (New York: Verso, 2011 ), 151 3.

[3J Frederick Douglass quoted in David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of

Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1S8. On the Haitian Revo

lution, see Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the. Abolition of

Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New

World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004);

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint l'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

(New York: Vintage, 1989); for a black eye-witness account, see Baron Pompee Valentin deVasley, An Essay on the Causes of the Revolution arid Civil Wars of Hayti {Exeter: Western

luminary Office, 1823), 15-42. On the reactions to the revolution see, Michel-Kolph Trouillot,

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997). For

Southern white reactions, see Alfred Hunt, Haiti's Influence, on Antebellum America: Slumbering

Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 107-46; for a

range of opinions on the impact of the Revolution see David Geggus, ed., The Impact of the

Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,

2001); Mathew Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and

Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010);

Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins Press, 2010).

[4J ‘Hayti’, The Rights of All, October 16,1829; 'Celebrations in Cincinnati’, Liberator, July 30,1831;

‘Domestic Slave Trade’, Boston Recorder, January 13, 1830; for work on the transnational appeal

of post-revolutionary Haiti, see Julius S. Scott, 'A Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American

Communication in the Age of the Haitian Revolution’ (PhD diss., Duke University, 1986); Ada

Ferrer, ‘Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic’, American Historical

Review 117, no. 1 (2012): 40-66.

[5] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 51.

|6) Job. B. Clement, ‘History of Education in Haiti: 1804-1915’, Revista de. Historia De América 88

(Jul-Dec 1979): 34; Religious Intelligence’, The Christian Observer 16, no. 191 (1817), 745;

Tilomas Julius Oxley, ’Education in Hayti’, Boston Recorder, April 17, 1819; Vastey, Essay on

the Causes of the Revolution, Appendix I, no. 1; The number 72,000 comes from Laurent

Dubois’ discussion of Henry Christophc’s education polity. Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The After

shocks of History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012), 73. For official government descrip

tion of the Haitian school system seethe Appendix to the 1819 report of the British and Foreign

School Society. Fourteenth Report of the British and Foreign School Society to the General

Meeting, May 15, 1819 (London: Bensley and Son, 1819), 70-3.

[7] Henri Christophe, Royaume d'Hayti: Déclaration du Roi (Cap-Haïtien: Chez P. Roux, Impri

meur du Roi, 1816); Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, 79-81: Vasley, Essay on the

Causes of the Revolution, 214.


21/24

294 Peter Wirzbicki

[8] William Harvey, Sketches of Hayti; from the Expulsion of the French to the Deuth of Christophe

(I.ondon: LB. Seeley, 1827), 202.

[9] I’rincc Saunders, Haytian Papers: A Collection of the Very Interesting Proclamations, and Other

Official Documents; Together with Some Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present Stule of the

Kingdom of llayti (London: W. Reed, 1816), 210-1; Barun de Vastey, 'Political Remarks on

Some French Works and Newspapers concerning Hayti’, The. Pamphle.te.er 13, no. 25 (1818):

185.

[ 10] Vasrey, 'Political Remarks on Some French Works’, 173.

[11] ‘Education’, The Rights of All, September 18, 1829; lob B. Clement, 'History of Education inHaiti: 1804 1915’, Revista de Historia de America 87 (January-June 1979): 165.

[12] liaron de Vastey, Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites: Remarks upon a Letter Addressed by

M. Mazeres, A French Ex-Colonialist, to f.C.L. Sismode de Sismondi, Containing Observations

on the Blacks and Whites, The Civilization of Africa, the Kingdom of Hayti, Etc ... (London:

F.B. Wright: 1817), 21; Baron de Vastey, ‘Political Remarks on Some French Works and News

papers concerning Hayti’, The Pamphleteer 13, no. 25 (1818): 209; Vastey, Essay on the Causes of

the Revolution, Appendix 1, no. 1. For more on Vastey see David Nicholls, ‘Pompée Valentin

Vastey: Royalist and Revolutionary’, Revista de Historia de América, no. 109 (1990): 129-43.

[13] James Franklin, The Present State of Hayti (Santo Domingo) With Remarks on its Agriculture,

Commerce, Laws, Religion, Finances, and Population (London: John Murray, 1828), 398;

William Wilbcrforce, ESQ, to the Head of the Haytian Government, December 16, 1820 in

Robert Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, eds., The Correspondence of William Wilberforce (London: |ohn Murray, 1840), 1:391-5.

[14] For recent work on Atlantic Creoles see Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age. of Revolution

(Cambridge: Harvard University' Press, 2010); A.O. White, ‘Black Leadership Class and Edu

cation in Antebellum Boston’, fournit1 of Negr o Education 42, no. 4 (1973): 526.

113) A.O White, ‘Black readership Class and Education in Antebellum Boston’, 510; Barbara

W. Brown and James M. Rose, Black Routs in Southeastern Connecticut, 1650-1900 (Detroit,

MI: Gale Research, 1980), 362; Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of fames Forten

(New York: Oxford University' Press, 2002), 211; Rev. William Emerson was a member of the

Sub-Committee on the African School that, in 1800, first created the African School in the

first place. See William Crowell et al., City Document-No. 23: Report to the Primary School Com

mittee, fune 15,1846 on the Petition of Sundry Colored Persons (Boston: J.H. Eastburn, 1846), 16;

‘The Annual Visitation’, Independent Chronicle, April 15, 1811; On international negotiations,

see Prince Saunders to Paul Cuffcc, June 25, 1812; Prince Saunders to Paul Cuffec, August 3,

1812. New Bedford Public Library, Cuffee Papers; Graham Russell Hodges, 'Prince Saunders’,

in American National Biography, ed. Mark Carnes and John A. Carnes (New York: Oxford Uni

versity Press, 1999), 19:308.

[16] ‘Prince Sanders’ Boston Weekly Messenger, December 7, 1815; Saunders’ trip was described in

a fairly hostile account in Joseph Marryat, More Thoughts Occasioned by Two Publications

which the Authors call ‘An Exposure of some of the Numerous Statements and Misrepresenta

tions Contained in a Pamphlet Commonly Known by the. Name Mr. Marryat's Pamphlet entitled

Thoughts, etc.’ and A Defence of the Bill for the Registration of Skives’ (London: J.M. Richard

son, 1816), 111; Henry Christophe to Thomas Clarkson, February' 5, 1816 in Earl Leslie

Griggs and Clifford H. Prator, eds., Henri Christophe and Thomas Clarkson: A Correspondence

(Berkeley: University' of California Press, 1952), 91; ‘Vaccination in Hayti’, The Eclectic Reper

tory and Analytical Review, Medical and Philosophical 6, no. 3 (1816): 395; ‘Letter Received At

Boston’, National Advocate, August 31, 1816; Harvey Newcomb, The 'Negro Pew.’ Being an

inquiry Concerning the Propriety of Distinctions in the House of God, on Account of Color

(Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837), 67; Saunders, Haytian Papers, iii; Job. B. Clement, ‘History

of F,ducaríon in Haiti: 1804-1915’, Revista de Historia De America 88 (July-Decemher

1979): 34.


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Slavery ó- Abolition 295

[17] Saunders, Haytian Papers, 223; the book sold for 75 cents. See ‘Haitian Papers’ Essex Register,

July 22,1818; Joseph Marryat, More Though ts Sti ll on the State of the West India Colonies and the.

Proceedings of the. African Insti tution (London; Hughes and Baynes, 1818), 39.

[18] Saunders, Haytian Papers, 215-6, 219.

[ 19) Ibid., 221.

|20J 'Prince Saunders ... New York Columbian, May 8,1818; William Bentley, The Diary of William

Bentley, D.D., Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Massachusetts (Salem, MA: Essex Institute,

1914), 4:517; ‘The Influence of Christianity Seems to be Gradually Raising the Blacks in the

scale of society’, Salem Gazette, May 29, 1818; Bentley, Diary, 4:522; 'Last Monday Evening

... ’. Paulson’s American Daily Advertiser, May 27,1818.

[21] Prince Saunders, An Address Delivered ut Bethel Church, Philadelphia on the 30th of September,

1818 before the Pennsylvania Augustine Society for the Education of People of Colour (Philadel

phia: Joseph I’akestraw, 1818), 4; ‘Just Received, and for Sale’, Franklin Gazette, October 24,

1818.

[221 Prince Saunders, Memoir Presented to the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and Improving the Condition of the African Race (Philadelphia: Dennis Heart!, 1818),

3, 13, 15, 16. Black preference for Haitian Emigration over Liberian colonization, even at

this early point, was common. Awhile newspaper in 1819 reported that ‘the free blacks of Phi

ladelphia have unanimously protested against the execution of the plan to colonize them in

Africa ... Their attention, it appears, is turned to Hayti’. ‘The Free Blacks ... ’. Newburyport

Herald, November 26, 1819.[23] See Prince Saunders to Thomas Clarkson, May 2, 1823 in Earl Leslie Griggs and Clifford

H. Prator, eds., Henri Christophe and Thomas Clarkson: A Correspondence (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1952), 249; ‘A Colored Man’, Philadelphia National Enquirer, July 11, 1839;

‘Prince Saunders’, Colored American, June 8, 1839.

[24j Peter Williams et al.. Address of the Board of Managers of the Haytian Emigration Society of

Coloured People: To the Emigrants Intending to Sail to the. Island of Hayti, in the brig De Win

Clinton (New York: Mahlon Day, 1824), 7; William Watkins, ‘Address’, Genius of Universal

Emancipation, August, 1825; F.A, ‘African Education’, Freedom’s Journal, February 15, 1828.

[25] David Walker, Walker's Appeal, in Pour Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citi

zens of the World, but in Particular, and very Expressly, to those of the United States of America,

Written in Boston, State, of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829, 3rd ed. (Boston: David Walker,

1830), 24; David Walker, ‘Address, Delivered before the General Colored Association at

Boston’, Freedom’s Journal, December 19, 1828; For more on Walker’s ideas about education

see Peter Hinks, To Awake my Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum

Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 91-115.

126] Walker, Appeal, 22,24,74, 37; For a good case study on antebellum white hostility to black edu

cation see; Hilary Moss, ‘Education’s Inequity: Opposition to Black Higher Education in Ante

bellum Connecticut’, History of Education Quarterly 46, no. 1 (2006): 16-35.

1271 For reprints of Vastey see, ’Hayti’, New York Daily Advertiser, May 13, 1818; ‘From A Late

English Paper’, City of Washington Gazette, May 21, 1818; ‘Literature of Hayti’, New England

Galaxy arid Masonic Magazine, May 29, 1818; ‘Revolutionary Incidents’, Rhode-Isiand Ameri

can, February 13, 1821. Vastey’s work received a favorable review and lengthy description in

the august North American Review in 1821. See ‘Hayti’, North American Review 12, no. 30

(1821), 112-34. The British journal Quarterly Review, which called Vastey an ‘intelligent

black’, ran long excerpts of his Political Reflexions. ‘Past and Present State of Hayti’, Quarterly

Review 21, no. 42 (1819), 456-8; Vastey was quoted in The Annual Report of the Auxiliary

Society of Frederick County, VA. for Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States

(Winchester, VA: Published by the Auxiliary Society, 1820), 20; for an example of Vastey

appearing during the debates engendered by the Missouri Compromise, see John Wright, A

Refutation of the Sophisms, Gross Misrepresentations, and Erroneous Quotations Contained in


23/24

296 Peter Wirzbicki

'An Americans' 'I.etter to the Edinburgh Reviewers' or Slavery, Inimical to the Character of the

Great Father of All (Washington D.C.: Printed by the Author, 1820), 33-5; see Catalogue of

the Library of the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Joseph

R.A. Skerrett, 1824), 184; ‘Africa; Excerpts from Baron de Vastey’, Freedom’s Journal, February'

7, 1829; ‘Africa: Excerpts from Baron de Vastey’, Freedom’s Journal, February 14, 1829; ‘Extracts

from Baron de Vastey s Work’, Freedom’s Journal , December 12, 1828.

(281 Tlayti V’, Freedom’s Journal, June 29, 1827; ‘The Republic of Haiti’, The Colored American,

March 11, 1837; ‘Hayti’, National Era, July 8,1847.

[29] ‘Education’, The Rights of All, September 18, 1829; African Free Schools in the United States’,

Freedom's Journal, June I, 1827; ‘Hayti’, Freedoms Journal, December 12, 1828; ‘Dr. Belfast

Burton, in a letter to the Rev. Richard Allen, of Philadelphia’, Genius of Universal Emancipation,

June, 1825.

(301 ‘Education’, The Rights of All, September 18, 1829.

1311 Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti-Slavery Labours in the

United States, Canada, and England (London: John Snow, 1855), 50; ‘Isaiah Degrass’s Essay’,

Freedom's Journal, March 14, 1829; Gregory U. Rigsby, Alexander Crummell: Pioneer in

Nineteenth-Century Pan-African Thought (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 20; David

Freedman, African-American Schooling in the South Prior to 18(51’, The. Journal of Negro

History 84, no. 1 (1999), 9; Lancasterian Schools were also popular among white Americans,

who saw them as a valuable tool to create republican citizens. See Dell Upton, ‘Lancasterian

Schools, Republican Citizenship, and the Spatial Imagination in Rarlv Nineteenth CenturyAmerica’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55, no. 3 (1996): 238-53.

|32] African Free Schools in the United States’, Freedom’s Journal, June 1, 1827; William C. Nell,

William Cooper Nell: Nineteenth-Century African American Abolitionist, Historian, Integration-

ist: Selected Writings from 1832-1874, ed. Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac

(Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2002), 221. l or more on white hostility to black education in

this period see Hilary J. Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in

Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

[33] Quotation is from the Augustine’s Constitution, reprinted in Prince Saunders, An Address

Delivered at Rethel Church ... before the Augustine Society, 10; ‘Boston Mutual Lyceum’, Libera

tor, July 20, 1833; ‘Take Notice’, Liberator, November 9, 1833; ‘Letter VI’, Freedom's Journal,

November 9, 1827; Dorothy B. Porter, ‘The Organized Educational Activities of Negro Literary

Societies, 1828-1846’, Journal of Negro Education 5, no. 4 (1836): 555-76; ‘Progress of the

Colored People of San Francisco’, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, September 22, 1854.

1341 Thomas Brooks’ lecture is advertised in ‘Notice’, Liberator, April 13,1838; ‘Adelphic Union’ Lib

erator, January 15, 1841, Adelphic Union Library' Association, Liberator, October 2!, 1842;

James McCuue Smith, The Destiny of the People of Color (New York; Published by Request,

1843), 8; 'From our Correspondent’, North Star, April 7, 1849; William Wells Brown, St

Domingo: Its Revolutions and its Patrio ts (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1855), 35.

[35] Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies (New York; Library of America, 1996), 336; Laurent

Dubois, An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History’ of the French Atlan

tic’, Social History 31, no. 1 (2006): 2, 7; Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the

Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge; Louisiana State University'

Press, 1997), 104.

[36] Sec ‘Abolition in Hay'ti’, National Enquirer, December 24, 1836; Rinchere wrote an article in the

Pennsylvania Freeman hoping to get buyers for his new history of Haiti, which he was publish

ing. See ‘Prospectus', Pennsylvania Freeman, August 17,1837; the series of articles in the North

Star was commenced in 1848, see ‘Hay’ti’, North Star, April 21, 1848.

(37| William C. Nell, William Cooper Neil; Nineteenth-Century African American Abolitionist, Histor

ian, Integrationist: Selected Writings From 1832-1874, ed. Dorothy Porter Wesley and Con

stance Porter Uzelac (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2002), 21; For examples of different


24/24


educational ideas based on gender, see ‘African Free School’, 'lite Rights of All, May 29,1829; On

the Female Literary Society sec McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 57-68.

[38] ‘An Address to the Young Men of Color, in Philadelphia, on the Importance of Associations of

Moral and Mental Improvement’, Philadelphia National Enquirer, April 29, 1837; Alexander

Crtimmell, Africa and America: Addresses and Discourses (Springfield, MA; Willey, 1891), 300.

[39] James McCune Smith, A Lecture vri the Haytien Revolutions; with a Sketch of the. Character of

Toussaint L'Ouverture (New York: Daniel Fanshaw, 1841), 15, 43; See ‘Haytien Revolutions’,

Colored American, August 7, 1841; Bibb quotes Vastey in Henry Bibb, ‘To our Old Masters,

No. 2’, Voice of the Fugitive, February 12, 1851.

[40] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 1996), 991; 'Why are

the Colored People Ignorant?*, Liberator, October 3,1845; Alexander Crummcll, ‘The Necessi

ties and Advantages of Education Considered in Relation to Colored Men’, Schomburg

Collection.

[41] Vastey, 'Political Remarks on Some French Works’, 238.