Frederick Douglass -- Serving in Haiti

 

The Republican Party won back the Presidency in 1888.  Douglass had campaigned for Benjamin Harrison and now wanted another government job.  A cabinet position was something that Douglass could dream about but he was willing to settle for his old job, recorder of deeds.  The position, ironically, went to Blanche K. Bruce, former black senator from Mississippi and a witness to Douglass’s marriage.  Douglass waited three months for a government appointment, all the while ignoring the advice of friends not to antagonize the new President by urging Harrison to bring back federal protection of the lives of Negroes in the South and of their right to vote.  In June 1889 Douglass was offered the ministry to Haiti.  Despite advice from friends, he accepted.

 

Two black generals, Francois D. Legitime and Florvil Hyppolite, had directed a revolution in 1888 that had removed Haiti’s president.  With naval and military aid provided by the American navy, Hyppolite then removed Legitime and his supporters from the island, and, as the new Haiti president, it was Hyppolite who received Douglass’s credentials in November of 1889.

 

The Harrison administration wanted something back for the helpfulness.  They wanted Mole St. Nicholas, an excellent harbor on the extreme northwestern tip of Haiti.  The location would then become the primary United States naval station in the Caribbean.

 

Always vulnerable, independent Haiti was now under the particularly avaricious eyes of white powers seeking bases for their growing navies-bases that in the Caribbean would support them in their rivalry to build a canal across the Central American isthmus.  Other Caribbean islands, among them Spain’s Cuba and the British West Indies, already belonged to competing European empires.  … They [the Haitians] knew that as a black republic their nation was viewed with much contempt and that it was judged fair prey by those wishing to annex part or all of it (McFeely 336).

 

Likely, Douglass had received his assignment to mollify the suspicions of Haitians, who were well familiar with his past history.  Douglass, himself, revered Haiti.  He believed that its people were a singular example of what all black people could accomplish, unhindered by white persecution.  Douglass, although in favor of acquiring the Haitian harbor for the navy’s use, well understood Haitian cynicism and performed his tasks openly and honestly, despite the arrogant words and threatening manner of an American admiral, who was assigned to work with Douglass in their negotiations to obtain a lease of the harbor.  Their efforts failed, and the administration abandoned the project in the late summer of 1891.  The expansionists of the administration had now focused their desire upon Hawaii, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.  President Harrison had never been more than luke warm about acquiring a Haitian harbor.

 

Critics in the press inaccurately accused Douglass ob being the main reason for his administration’s failure to obtain the harbor.  New York newspapers demanded and predicted that he would be fired.  On June 30 Douglass submitted his resignation, but not because of the criticism.  Both his own health and that of Helen had suffered from the climate.

 

Douglass defended himself six months later in the North American Review.  “A man must defend himself,” he wrote, “if only to demonstrate his fitness to defend anything else.”

 

… To be sure, he had had enough of Haiti, but his pride had been hurt, and, worse, his loyalty to his country had been challenged.  … He contended … that he had had no orders to try to secure it [the harbor] during his first year in Haiti and therefore could not be charged with delay in the months immediately following Hyppolite”s assumption of power.  Discussing the negotiations that did take place, Douglass was candid in suggesting that Admiral Gherardi had been condescending and hence insulting to Antenor Firmin, Haiti’s secretary of state.  [After the article appeared, Firmin, from exile in Paris, wrote Douglass that his resignation was a great loss to both Haiti and the United States] McFeely 356-357).

 

This was Douglass’s last government position.

 

 

Work cited:

 

McFeely, William S.  Frederick Douglass.  New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.  Print.