Yaël 🌷✨@yatalley
Dessalines Offered Immediate Citizenship to Any Black Person Who Came to Haiti (1804)
Just 14 days after independence, revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines issued an executive act offering 40 piasters (about $40) per person to any ship captain who would bring formerly enslaved Africans, indigenous people, and freed Black Americans to Haiti. He attempted to recruit 500,000 Africans, indigenous people, and U.S. Black people, offering them not only freedom but immediate citizenship the moment they set foot on Haitian soil — provided they declared themselves Black. Haiti’s population had been decimated by the revolutionary war, and Dessalines was determined to rebuild it as a free Black nation.
The 1816 Constitution: Free Soil for All People of African Descent
Article 44 of Haiti’s 1816 Constitution — written under President Alexandre Pétion — codified this promise into law. It stated:
“All Africans and Indians, and the descendants of their blood, born in the colonies or in foreign countries, who come to reside in the Republic of Haiti will be recognized as Haitians.”
This meant that any enslaved person who reached Haitian soil was automatically free and a citizen. This was tested almost immediately: in January 1817, seven enslaved Jamaicans seized the ship they were working on and sailed to southern Haiti, where they found — as they had expected — legal protection, freedom from slavery, and Haitian citizenship
Haiti Intercepted Slave Ships and Freed the People on Board
Haiti did not just wait for people to come to them. The Haitian government actively intercepted ships carrying enslaved people and freed their human cargo. This was a direct, material act of liberation at great diplomatic risk, as Haiti had promised colonial powers it would not interfere in their affairs.
Boyer’s African American Emigration Program (1820s)
In the 1820s, President Jean-Pierre Boyer launched a formal, state-sponsored program to bring free African Americans to Haiti. He sent his representative Jonathas Granville to New York and promised prospective migrants:
•Free passage (the Haitian government paid all personal travel expenses)
•Grants of fertile land
•Advances of food, tools, and necessities until settlers were established
As many as 13,000 African Americans emigrated to Haiti in the mid-1820s under this program. It was the largest state-sponsored effort by any nation to offer Black Americans a free homeland.
The Painful Irony
Haiti did all of this while simultaneously being strangled economically by the international community. France extorted Haiti into paying 150 million gold francs (equivalent to billions today) as “reparations” to French slaveholders for the loss of their “property” i.e., the enslaved people who had freed themselves. The United States refused to recognize Haiti diplomatically until 1862. The very nations Haiti helped most have repeatedly turned their backs on it.
The historical record is unambiguous: Haiti was the most active and consistent champion of Black freedom in the entire Western Hemisphere, and it paid an enormous price for that commitment.
-
The irony is almost too painful to articulate. The same Haitians being called “illegal immigrants” and deported were legally in this country. These were not people who snuck across a border. They were invited, processed, and authorized by the United States government.
So the question the tweet asks “do any of these other races of people come to our rescue?” has a very specific, documented answer when it comes to Haitians: yes, they literally did, for 200 years, at enormous cost to themselves. And the response they are getting now is deportation flights, on legal status the U.S. government itself granted them.
The issue is not that BlackAmericans made someone else’s problem their own. The issue is that a nation that has consistently shown up for Black freedom is being repaid with erasure, both of their history & their legal right to be there
