Conversion Narratives, Emigration, and Black Authority in 19th-Century Hispaniola

This paper examines nineteenth-century British Wesleyan missionary letters to understand how Protestants discussed Black religiosity and religious conversion in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, key sites in the era’s transnational struggle for Black autonomy. In the decades after the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), Europe and the United States denied Haiti inclusion in the sisterhood of nations, forcing the young nation to exert political power through commerce, literature, and negotiations with the Vatican. Concurrently, Haiti became a refuge for Black people fleeing slavery in the United States and the surrounding islands; during Unification (1822-1844), when Haiti governed the whole island of Hispaniola, upwards of thirteen thousand Black people emigrated from the United States. In this context, the London Wesleyan Missionary Society sent missionaries to the island, hoping to proselytize both Catholics and US Black Protestant emigrants. They believed that Protestant conversion would engender social and economic stability, elevate Haiti on the world stage, and disprove the lie of Black misrule. Steadfast in their mindset, Wesleyan missionaries maintained churches on the island from the 1830s through the twentieth century. Yet, due to war and underfunding, many Wesleyan churches operated as de facto autonomous Black religious spaces. This paper asks: how did Black ministers and congregants narrate their religious lives? In what ways did their viewpoints converge and conflict with those of white British missionaries? Conversion narratives demonstrate that the era’s continued struggle for Black authority in Haiti, Dominican Republic, and elsewhere also occurred in religious spaces; it was a matter of the soul.