“Hayti—Home of the Black Race”: The Haytian Bureau of Emigration and the Knitting of a Transatlantic Network in the Early Nineteenth Century

In the early 19th century, many free African Americans considered emigration from the United States as a way to escape racial discrimination. While the majority of those who actually left turned to Canada, some individuals looked to the Republic of Haiti in search of universal freedom. To organize the migration, the “Haytian Bureau of Emigration” was opened in 1859 by James Redpath, a “white” US-American who had been authorized as an official emigration agent by the Haitian government. The bureau produced a variety of materials such as a newspaper, a guidebook to Haiti and personal letters to individuals interested in migration.
On the basis of these materials, I discuss how the Bureau contributed to the production of an Atlantic network both practically and at the same time conceptually. I understand both practical and conceptual aspects of the work of the Bureau as mutually dependent. On a practical level, the bureau distributed information on Haiti, and provided financial aid and transportation for individuals from the US to the Caribbean. On a conceptual level, its publications discussed how the network was to look like. They defined for example who was suitable to go to Haiti and who was not, and suggested what people were to take, and what they were to do once in Haiti. These suggestions were based on ideas of an essential common blackness and connected to concepts of nationalism. Ideas of nation, citizenship and blackness were reoccurring topics in the materials produced by the Bureau. I try to discuss how these concepts structured the network, and how they included some individuals while excluding others based on notions of race, class, and gender.