In September 1829, David Walker published the first edition of his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a pamphlet that became a stirring call to arms for both slaves and free blacks alike. Walker's audience was blacks in the United States and his aim was to foster black unity and education, combat racial stereotypes, and make the case for the abolition of slavery. Like most abolitionists, black and white, Walker hoped that the end of slavery could come about through peaceful means. Unlike most other abolitionists, however, Walker openly called for slaves to violently resist their bondage, stating, “it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.”Footnote ¹ While advocates of pacifism and nonviolence often based their positions on their Christian faith, it was Walker's Christianity which lent support to his calls for revolutionary violence. “Does the Lord condescend to hear their cries and see their tears in consequence of oppression?” he asked. “Will he let the oppressors rest comfortably and happy always? Will he not cause the very children of the oppressors to rise up against them, and oftimes to put them to death?”Footnote ² Walker firmly believed that God would have his vengeance on blacks’ oppressors and that the vehicles for that vengeance might very well be the slaves themselves.

The enslaved population in the United States had many historical examples of slaves winning their freedom through revolutionary violence, chief among these being the Haitian Revolution, which concluded during Walker's youth in Wilmington, North Carolina. In Article II of the Appeal, Walker endeavors to reassure his readers that they can effectively fight slavery, noting that in the ancient world, God had raised up black leaders such as Hannibal “to nearly conquer Rome.” Walker then shifted gears, noting, “what need have I to refer to antiquity, when Hayti, the glory of the blacks and terror of tyrants, is enough to convince the most avaricious and stupid of wretches” of the futility of maintaining the system of chattel slavery.Footnote ³ Indeed, this “glory of blacks” provided inspiration for another slave plot in Charleston, South Carolina that Walker is believed to have known about and possibly participated in. Walker moved to Charleston sometime after 1816 to pursue economic opportunities unavailable to him in Wilmington. Since the late eighteenth century, free blacks in Charleston, including refugees from Saint Domingue, established mutual-aid societies, burial societies, and other institutions that demonstrate an increasing level of organization within the black community. Both slaves and free black Methodists began meeting together and holding religious services around 1815 and they established the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church the following year. The church was finally burned down after the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in 1822, as local whites believed that the plot to rebel had been hatched in the church and discussed there. Indeed, three of the five leaders charged in the conspiracy were class leaders in the congregation. It is likely that David Walker knew Vesey and others charged in the conspiracy, individuals who were themselves influenced by the Haitian Revolution, and thus began to develop his emerging views on the necessity and practicality of slave rebellions.Footnote ⁴

Both Kellie Carter Jackson's Force and Freedom and Brandon Byrd's The Black Republic explore the intellectual history of African Americans’ ideas about Haiti and the practical effects that those ideas had on black political organizing and community building from the antebellum era to the end of the US occupation of Haiti in 1934. Force and Freedom does not focus solely on ideas of Haiti, as The Black Republic does, but Haiti nevertheless looms large in Jackson's narrative, which offers a powerful reinterpretation of the antebellum abolitionist movement. Like recent scholarship on the movement, such as Manisha Sinha's The Slave's Cause and Patrick Rael's Eighty-Eight Years, Jackson places African American ideas and activism at the center of the movement.Footnote ⁵ Among the ideas that were most critical, in her assessment, were those about violence that were based on the American revolutionary tradition as well as the example of the Haitian Revolution. While scholars such as Sara Fanning, Leslie Alexander, Jacqueline Bacon, and Ashli White have examined antebellum blacks’ ideas about Haiti, none before Jackson has provided a book-length treatment of how African American ideas about violence became central to the abolitionist movement.Footnote ⁶ Brandon Byrd's book is more explicitly focused solely on African Americans’ ideas on Haiti, but his work demonstrates the vital importance of these ideas after the Civil War, a period that historians have thus far neglected. While Jackson demonstrates how Haiti inspired the politics of violence among black abolitionists, Byrd broadens the discussion to display Haiti's importance to African Americans’ ideas on race, gender, nation, history, and colonialism. Taken together, these books speak to both the vital role Haiti has played in African American thought and the vibrancy of the black intellectual tradition before World War II.

* * *

In an 1856 article in Frederick Douglass's Paper, black abolitionist James McCune Smith ridiculed celebrations of British Emancipation because throughout the British Caribbean, freedom was given to slaves rather than being something they took for themselves. “Our white brethren cannot understand us unless we speak to them in their own language,” McCune Smith argued. “They recognize only the philosophy of force.”Footnote ⁷ McCune Smith believed that African Americans would never be respected by whites and implied that they might not even respect themselves unless they violently seized their own freedom. Buying their way out of slavery, or, even worse, having it bestowed upon them by whites, would be akin to an insult and deserving of the same ridicule he was then heaping on British Emancipation. The “philosophy of force” that McCune Smith references provided Jackson with the title for her introduction and represents the central theme of Force and Freedom. As she notes early on, the book “actively examines one of the perennial questions in political thought: is violence a valid means of producing social change?”Footnote ⁸ Most black abolitionists, Jackson argues, would eventually answer in the affirmative, although they took different routes toward accepting and articulating a philosophy of force.

The intellectual foundations of black abolitionists’ philosophy of force stemmed from two main sources—the American Revolution and the Haitian Revolution. Black abolitionist leaders were intimately familiar with the rhetoric and key events of the American Revolution and took inspiration from the example of a people willing to fight and die for their freedom. While revolutionary leaders balked at the idea of slaves following their lead, African Americans nonetheless used the history of the American Revolution in their own struggle against slavery. But even more important to black abolitionist leaders was the success of the Haitian Revolution and the creation of the first independent black republic in the western hemisphere. The Haitian Revolution demonstrated to African Americans that slavery could be overthrown by violent means. “For black abolitionists, an independent Haiti represented the impossible made possible,” Jackson posits. “The Haitian Revolution … served to illustrate the fact that political violence was a direct and inevitable consequence of slavery and oppression.”Footnote ⁹

The Haitian Revolution influenced some of the earliest slave rebellions in nineteenth-century America. Gabriel Prosser, an enslaved man living in Richmond, Virginia, planned a revolt against slavery in 1800 that is thought to have been an attempt to replicate the revolt in Saint Domingue. Charles Deslondes, a free mulatto from Saint Domingue, had a direct connection to the Haitian Revolution and likewise attempted to copy its success in the United States. Deslondes led one of the largest slave rebellions in the United States in the 1811 German Coast rebellion just outside New Orleans, an uprising that authorities quickly thwarted. And just a little over a decade later, Denmark Vesey, a free black man living in Charleston, planned a revolt against slavery that was also unsuccessful. Vesey had lived in Haiti and, like both Prosser and Deslondes, took inspiration from Haiti's example and endeavored to bring about a similar result in the United States. While none of these rebellions achieved their stated aim, they demonstrate the extent to which a philosophy of force already permeated a segment of the enslaved and free black population in the American South even before the abolitionist movement began to gain steam in the 1830s.Footnote ¹⁰

Black abolitionists initially embraced Garrisonian nonviolence for practical reasons. With his publication of the Liberator beginning in 1831 and formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society two years later, William Lloyd Garrison quickly became an important ally to African Americans. His paper contained writings of black leaders, poets, and religious figures, and the abolitionist organization he helped create represented an important resource that could help spread the message of abolitionism across the nation. African Americans thus made the pragmatic choice to go along with moral suasion, Jackson argues, because they felt it was necessary to compromise with whites in order to build an effective antislavery coalition. It would not be long before some started to back away from that position, however. Events in the 1830s such as the rise of mob violence against abolitionists, new restrictions on voting, limited economic opportunities, and prohibitions on migration to certain states led to increasing support for armed self-defense. Shortly after Elijah Lovejoy's murder in Alton, Illinois in 1837, for example, African Americans saw a rise in racial violence from local whites and began collecting arms to protect their community, a trend that accelerated in the 1840s.

One of the key turning points in this acceleration was Henry Highland Garnet's 1843 “Address to the Slaves” at the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York. This speech is often attributed as the beginning of his advocacy of violence, but that advocacy actually began in 1835 while he was attending the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire. The Noyes Academy, an interracial school founded by white abolitionist George Kimball, came under attack by local residents shortly after opening. A mob began firing shots at the school's boarding house and Garnet picked up a shotgun and began returning fire. While the school was destroyed, the event was nonetheless a transformative one, leading him to believe that armed self-defense and violence would be necessary to abolish slavery in the United States. It was this message he tried to convey to slaves in 1843, arguing that moral suasion had failed blacks and that violence would be a practical political strategy. Along with his personal experience, Garnet's faith likewise underlay his belief in the utility of violence. He argued that slaves have a moral duty to obey God and cannot do that while in bondage, thus they should use any means possible to free themselves. Even if they had to risk their lives, Garnet argued, “you had far better all die—die immediately, than live as slaves, and entail your wretchedness upon your posterity.”Footnote ¹¹ Garnet's speech was an electrifying one that “not only shocked the delegates in attendance but also marked a turning point in how the abolition of slavery should be approached.”Footnote ¹² While not all abolitionists immediately came on board in supporting political violence, as evidenced by the rift between Garnet and Frederick Douglass, by the end of the decade an increasing number of black activists, as well as white abolitionists such as Gerrit Smith and Theodore Parker, endorsed blacks’ right to armed self-defense.

The key moment in African Americans’ articulation of a philosophy of force was the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. This law “did something quite remarkable for the abolitionist movement, and in particular, African Americans: it made violence a necessary alternative.”Footnote ¹³ After 1850, Jackson notes, African Americans simply did not have the luxury of theorizing about violence. It was either employ violence, or risk being kidnapped and sent into slavery. Blacks’ republican ideology, the example of Haiti, and the legal and political context of the United States let to increasing calls to jettison moral suasion, which they came to believe had failed miserably. In response to the law, former slave William Parker formed the Lancaster Black Self-Protection Society to protect against a group of slave catchers operating in Christiana, Pennsylvania. In addition to protecting fugitive slaves from kidnapping, Parker's society also enacted retribution on those blacks who gave up fugitives. The philosophy of force was not simply about self-defense but also about taking the fight to the enemy, and sometimes those enemies were African Americans who gave up other blacks to make money. African Americans in Pennsylvania were joined by blacks and whites in New York and Boston in resisting kidnappings and enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, with the most famous of these being the attempted rescue of Anthony Burns in 1854.

Resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act gave black men a chance to prove their manhood and strength, but Jackson also makes an important contribution in demonstrating the vital role of black women in articulating and carrying out a philosophy of force. This was especially true during John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859. Like black abolitionists, Brown was also inspired by the Haitian Revolution and “the memory of [Toussaint] Louverture fed his faith in revolutionary black violence.”Footnote ¹⁴ Brown also took inspiration and received financial support for his raid from black women. He met Harriet Tubman in Canada in 1858 and tried to enlist her help recruiting former slaves for his planned raid. Tubman agreed to help Brown but likely fell ill and was unable to participate in the raid itself. Brown also received financial support from Mary Ellen Pleasant, a black entrepreneur who was probably Brown's largest financial backer, having donated $30,000 to the cause between 1857 and 1859. The involvement of Tubman and Pleasant demonstrates the key roles that women played in articulating and carrying out a philosophy of force. While Pleasant “could not be the face of the rebellion, she could operate as the wallet of the rebellion and the eventual usher of freedom.”Footnote ¹⁵ Historians have increasingly highlighted the key roles that black women played in the abolitionist movement, but few have paid attention to their role in supporting and promoting violent resistance to slavery.

* * *

Brandon Byrd's The Black Republic picks up where Jackson's book ends, namely the Civil War era. While Force and Freedom explores Haiti primarily as an inspiration for violent resistance to slavery and as a destination for emigration, The Black Republic focuses solely on African Americans’ ideas about Haiti and is thus a more expansive treatment that includes ideas about gender, respectability, American imperialism, race, and nationalism, among other topics. Byrd's main premise in the work is that “there existed multiple and sometimes conflicting ideas of Haiti that changed over time but remained critical to African Americans during the long postemancipation era following the U.S. Civil War.”Footnote ¹⁶ Byrd's book augments our understanding of African American intellectual history from the 1860s through the 1930s and likewise contributes to the burgeoning field of black internationalism.

African Americans’ ideas about Haiti during and immediately after the Civil War reflected a sense of optimism that progress for blacks was coming. In July 1862, the United States officially recognized Haiti's independence, which was seemingly the dawn of a new day for black intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass. For religious African Americans, diplomatic recognition and the Emancipation Proclamation that went into effect six months later were the fulfillment of the prophesy in Psalm 68:31. In short order, the AME Church began missionary activity meant to “imbue Haitians with U.S. middle-class cultural norms, rehabilitate the image of Haiti, elevate the status of all black people, and place their fitness for self-governance beyond reproach.”Footnote ¹⁷ And herein lay the complexity and contradictory nature of black Americans’ ideas about Haiti. As Jackson demonstrated and Byrd suggests in the introduction, during the antebellum period Haiti was largely seen as a positive example, which African Americans should take inspiration from and try to emulate. This was still the case in the Reconstruction era, but the AME Church would not have sent missionaries to civilize Haitians if they did not think they were uncivilized in some respects. Notions of Haiti as a shining example of black independence and as a nation in need of saving existed side by side in black thought. William Wells Brown, for example, highlighted the achievements of the Haitian Revolution and the contributions of Haiti to ideas about freedom in his book The Black Man. Others took a more derogatory view, with AME minister Benjamin Tucker Tanner claiming that Haitians were uneducated, uncivilized, and inferior to African Americans. For Tucker and other black intellectuals, Haiti showed how civilized African Americans were and demonstrated the need for Christianity and commerce in developing African nations.Footnote ¹⁸

Haiti also represented an opportunity for African Americans to participate in American diplomacy, something that would signal blacks’ inclusion within the body politic. White writers such as J. R. Ralls used the example of Haiti to argue that African Americans were unprepared for self-government and political participation. John Mercer Langston, the second US minister resident and consul general to Haiti, tried to counter Ralls's assessment and demonstrate how developed and civilized Haiti was in order to make his case for black equality in the United States. But despite his opposition to racist depictions of Haiti, Langston still argued to Haitian politicians that their nation's political stability depended on their modeling themselves after the American political system. Additionally, Langston noted, Haiti must abandon its practice of Catholicism and Vodou and embrace Protestant Christianity to join the roster of civilized nations. “There was no question in Langston's mind,” Byrd posits, “that U.S. political institutions provided the best model for Haitian politicians, that Protestantism offered Haitian peasants unrivaled lessons in piety and industriousness, or that global capitalism was the best structure for organizing Haitian social and economic life.”Footnote ¹⁹ Haiti thus became another means for African Americans interested in “uplifting the race,” an analysis largely absent from Kevin Gaines's classic work by the same name.Footnote ²⁰

Haiti continued to loom large in African American thought during the rise of Jim Crow at the end of the nineteenth century. The late 1880s witnessed growing critiques of Haiti by whites, who continued to portray the nation as backward, uncivilized, and in need of American military intervention. Frederick Douglass, who was appointed minister resident and consul general to Haiti in 1889, did his best to advocate for a less aggressive US foreign policy toward the island, noting that intervention was the cause of, and not merely a response to, Haitian political instability. The journalist T. Thomas Fortune sought to counter damaging narratives of Haiti by promoting the works of Haitian authors such as Roche Grellier, who wrote multiple books pushing back against racist depictions of the country and explaining the nation's political instability. AME minister Solomon Porter Hood joined this effort, writing two articles in the AME Church Review that argued that Haitian political instability dated back to French actions during the colonial period, especially their pitting of mulattos and blacks against one another, and that contemporary problems in Haiti were largely due to the lingering effects of slavery.Footnote ²¹

The work of Fortune and Hood demonstrated the growing level of literary and intellectual connections between Haitians and African Americans, and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair provided yet another key opportunity for black intellectuals to show the strong ties between the two groups. While African Americans were excluded from planning the World's Fair and, to a large extent, from participating in it, Haiti was invited and was eager to represent both its own country and African Americans, as demonstrated in its appointment of Frederick Douglass as one of its commissioners. Members of the black press looked to Haiti's participation in the event, and especially the speedy construction of its impressive pavilion, as evidence of Haitian progress. Douglass gave two speeches discussing Haiti and lifting up the country as an example of freedom and liberty for the world to follow and admire. Additionally, the World's Fair was an important site for an articulation of black masculinity, something that whites increasingly denied to blacks but that was seen as the foundation of civilization. Black intellectuals portrayed black manliness through plays such as Dessalines, put on in Chicago during the event, to foster race pride and a sense of black masculinity divorced from the norms of white manliness. In this sense, ideas of Haiti at the turn of the twentieth century harkened back to similar notions in the antebellum period, when Haiti was seen as an example of manly resistance against slavery and white supremacy.Footnote ²²

At the beginning of the twentieth century, African American ideas about Haiti continued to reflect an odd blend of American patriotism, support for both black and white imperialism, black nationalism, and resistance to American control of the nation. William F. Pickens, for example, an African American student at Yale, wrote an essay for an oratorical competition that argued that the Haitian Revolution was “a low point in Western Civilization rather than the greatest blow in defense of human rights” the world had ever seen.Footnote ²³ Pickens made the case for American annexation in his essay, arguing that it would help end discrimination, provide a missionary and benevolent opportunity to American blacks, uplift Haiti, and benefit United States citizens. Other black intellectuals took Pickens to task for his accommodationism and implicit acceptance of white racist ideas about Haiti. William Monroe Trotter, founding editor of the Boston Guardian, argued that Pickens had sold out Haitians for lucrative speaking engagements and was “the first Negro at Yale who blindly accepted the white man's estimate of the Negro and proclaimed from the house-top that the Negro is an inferior being and not fit to govern himself.”Footnote ²⁴ Byrd suggests that that Trotter's excoriation of Pickens was an extension of his problems with Booker T. Washington, with whom he closely associated Pickens.Footnote ²⁵ Trotter's critique was likely also a reflection of Trotter's burgeoning internationalism, as the Guardian “offered a definition of blackness that transcended national boundaries and bound Haitians to African Americans.”Footnote ²⁶ Ideas about Haiti thus speak to vitally important internecine debates between black intellectuals as well as to the rise of internationalist sentiments among black thinkers.

African American ideas about Haiti focused primarily on the morality and utility of the United States occupation of the island between 1915 and 1934. The assassination of Haitian president Guillaume in 1915 convinced many whites and blacks that Haiti was unfit for self-rule and was again (or still) in need of a civilizing influence. The leading black intellectual of his time, W. E. B. Du Bois, reflects well both sides of the debate among African American thinkers. Du Bois initially believed that the American occupation might be useful to Haiti and he used the pages of The Crisis magazine, the organ of the NAACP, to cover Haiti for the next two decades. Early on, Du Bois believed that interventionism might be a means “by which black and white politicians, academics, and businessmen from the United States could save Haiti from itself, pay a form of reparations to black people, and affirm U.S. leadership throughout the Americas.”Footnote ²⁷ By the 1920s, however, Du Bois had changed his tune, coming to view the US marines’ treatment of Haitians as akin to white southerners’ treatment of African Americans. He also came to see Haiti's situation as part of the broader oppression of working people in the global South. In these views, he was joined by black intellectuals such as A. Philip Randolph, Hubert Harrison, and Cyril Briggs, among others, who came to see the anti-occupation movement as a small part of a worldwide struggle against colonialism and imperialism. The shift in Du Bois's thought and the rising prominence of thinkers like Briggs and Harrison represent a key shift in black thought more broadly, namely a move away from notions of liberal integrationism that argued that blacks could achieve equality by adhering to American values and supporting the nation's militarism and imperialism. Instead, this era witnessed a growing affinity for socialism and communism among black thinkers, an affinity that went hand in hand with a black internationalist consciousness.Footnote ²⁸

* * *

Kellie Carter Jackson's Force and Freedom and Brandon Byrd's The Black Republic both shed light on key issues in the scholarship on the growing field of black intellectual history. La TaSha Levy argues that the value of African American intellectual history “lies in the brilliant ways the scholarship disrupts Eurocentric conceptions of who counts as an intellectual and what constitutes intellectual work.”Footnote ²⁹ Neither Jackson nor Byrd explicitly theorizes this question of who counts as an intellectual (one of the few drawbacks of both works), yet both of their books demonstrate the vital intellectual work performed by the enslaved, black politicians, religious figures, abolitionists, newspaper editors, students, and clubwomen, among other groups. As such, these two books speak well to the methodological issues at the heart of recent volumes on black intellectual history, many of which emphasize the need to move beyond focusing solely on the thought of middle-class blacks and explore the ideas of those with little formal education.Footnote ³⁰

Related to this broadening of who counts as an intellectual is a rethinking of the archive of black thought, and these two books both do a masterful job in this vein, placing their work in line with intellectual historians who have used the methods of cultural history to understand the worldviews of people who expressed ideas in nontraditional formats and sources.Footnote ³¹ Drawing from proceedings of black conventions, poems, newspaper articles, speeches, and more, Jackson and Byrd have helped shed light on the vital ways in which Haiti impacted black thought for more than a century. Lastly, both of these works shed important light on the key contributions of black women intellectuals. Whether it was black abolitionist women articulating a philosophy of force in the 1850s or black clubwomen registering their opposition to the American occupation of Haiti in the 1920s, African American women have been key “producers of knowledge” who have transformed the contours of the black intellectual tradition.Footnote ³²