hoped to persuade free blacks in the North that Haiti could provide them with an asylum from American racial oppression.26
Before Saunders returned to Boston in 1818, the mainstream press had already set the stage for his Haitian emigration plan. One article in the New England Palladium in 1817 championed Haiti as an ideal location for black emigration, preferable to an African colony such as Sierra Leone. The article proclaimed that “a land of promise nearer our doors” seemed a more likely location than Africa. The author of the article reminded free blacks that, in Haiti, “the same constitution that excludes the white man, invites the black.”27
Soon after Saunders arrived in the United States, he published a second edition of The Haytian Papers for an American audience. These documents, according to Saunders, proved that black people were capable of self-rule and were endowed with “natural intelligence,” falsifying the assertions of prejudiced whites who “have endeavoured to impress the public with the idea that those official documents, which have occasionally appeared in this country, are not written by black Haytians themselves.”28 Saunders’s respect for Haiti and King Christophe stemmed in no small part from the “Code Henri,” and Saunders asserted that “nothing that white men have been able to arrange is equal to it.”29 Saunders presented Haiti’s legal code and portions of the “Deliberations of the Consuls of the Republic” to demonstrate African resourcefulness and intelligence. Ultimately, he hoped to gain white financial support for African American immigration to Haiti, and impress upon black Americans the potential for a better life in a nation free of racial prejudice and slavery.30
In September 1818, Prince Saunders left Massachusetts for Bethel Church in Philadelphia to make an address for the Pennsylvanian Augustine Society in regard to his Haitian emigration plan. His address called for black education and self-determination, and he suggested to the African American audience that they consider taking their intelligence and Christian virtue to Haiti. He explained: “Perhaps there never was a period, when the attention of so many enlightened men was so vigorously awakened to a sense of importance of a universal dissemination of the blessings of instruction, as at this enlightened age, in this, in the northern and eastern sections of our country, in some portions of Europe, and in the island of Hayti.”31 By the meeting’s end, Saunders had convinced prominent African American leaders such as James Forten and Russell Parrott, who had condemned colonization soon after the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1817, that emigration to Haiti and colonization to Africa were rooted in two quite different and discrete notions.
It appears that Parrott and Forten were persuaded by Saunders’s speech, and this may have planted the seed of interest in emigration to Haiti that grew among free blacks in the North during the 1820s. Although historian Arthur O. White characterizes Saunders’s address as an “ironic moment,” where the “foremost black colonizationist” lectured an anticolonizationist audience about educational uplift and Haitian emigration, the evidence suggests that free blacks in Philadelphia distinguished the emigration proposals initiated by blacks from those of the white-led African colonization project.32 The Haitian emigration movement, he insists, differed from the ACS-derived colonization movement to Africa. Thus, Saunders’s goal was to convince his audience that black Americans had the chance to lead a transnational movement against slavery, the slave trade, and nation building on a grand scale.
As the idea of Haitian emigration gained popularity throughout the North in the 1820s, some black Americans, such as a man named James Tredwell, wrote directly to Haitian officials to inquire specifically about the benefits of leaving the United States for Haiti. The secretary general of Haiti, Joseph Inginac, responded that “the men of color, who may desire to become Haytians, will find but little difference in our manner of living from that of the places they shall leave. . . . Men of all arts, of all trades—smiths, braziers, tinmen, ship and house carpenters, millwrights, caulkers, coopers, cabinet makers, boot and shoemakers—can earn in this place from six to twelve dollars per week, and even more, according to their talents and activity.”33
While this letter reads like an advertisement for Haitian emigration as an alternative to living “under the dominion of a barbarous prejudice” in the United States, Secretary General Inginac expressed his sincere desire to see African Americans enjoy the fruits of liberty in a way that reflected his sense of African diasporic unity. For example, he wrote that “this message, sir, could not but be received with the greatest satisfaction by those who have sacrificed twenty-eight years of their life, in order to efface the traces of a yoke to which other men, who pretend to virtue and justice, had long enchained them.” The secretary-general deliberately and explicitly framed Haitian independence within an oppositional tradition that linked emigration to Haiti with the black American struggle against slavery in the South and racial discrimination in the North.34
After gaining support from prominent blacks from Boston to Philadelphia, Saunders shifted his appeal to the mostly white antislavery organization, the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race. In 1818, just over a year after the formation of the American Colonization Society, colonization was at the center of debate at the American Convention’s annual meeting, the largest gathering of American Convention members in its history. It was here that Saunders read his “Memoir,” based upon his experience in Haiti, in an effort to build a network of white American philanthropists with the financial wherewithal to fund African American emigration to Haiti. Saunders also utilized this opportunity to differentiate between colonization and emigration, and he expressed to the delegates the general fear among free blacks that a large-scale colonization scheme had been hatched to expel them from the United States. In his conclusion, he explained that a movement encouraging free black emigration to Haiti would undermine the American Colonization Society, while providing blacks with a new home.35 Saunders read his “Memoir” to show these antislavery reformers that Haitian emigration was a more realistic alternative than African colonization.While it is unclear how influential Prince Saunders’s presentation of his “Memoir” was to the members, the outcry against colonization among some of the delegates compelled the Convention’s leadership to establish a committee to investigate colonization.36 This committee was also instructed to investigate Haitian emigration within the context of the ACS’s African colonization project.37
After deliberating on the merits of colonization, the American Convention’s committee reported back that it found the ACS’s plan unrealistic, and that it would neither improve the lives of African Americans nor eradicate slavery in the United States. The committee determined that the $82,000,000 in estimated expenses was too costly, and the fact that most African Americans rejected colonization only further compromised the ACS in their eyes.38 While committee members believed that colonization and emigration would benefit some free blacks, they declared that ultimately both the ACS colonization plan and the Haitian emigration movement would undermine universal emancipation, which many wholeheartedly supported.39 Thus, little enthusiasm for either colonization to Africa or Haitian emigration took root among white American Convention members in the late 1810s.
Although the committee rejected colonization or emigration schemes, it did recommend, instead, a black settlement west of the Missouri River, which would allow benevolent whites to support resettled blacks as they lifted themselves from their “degradation.”40 This, the committee argued, would benefit the nation because these industrious African Americans were capable of populating the western frontier with upright, Christian communities that would resemble the ones they would leave in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. By spreading Christianity to indigenous tribes who viewed the United States and Western culture with disdain, African Americans had the potential to serve as intermediaries for those native peoples on the outskirts of American civilization.41 The committee’s recommendations were included in the American Convention’s annual statement, which was mailed out to abolition societies across the nation.
Although these recommendations reflected white American Convention members’
