An African American and Latinx History of the United States Read online

  African Americans, by contrast, lifted up the Haitian Revolution as a great moment in world history to learn from. In 1827, in Freedom’s Journal, it was stated, “There are very few events on record which have produced more extraordinary men than the revolution in St. Domingo. The negro character at that eventful period, burst upon us in all the splendor of native and original greatness; and the subsequent transactions in that Island have presented the most incontestable truths that the negro is not, in general, wanting in the higher qualifications of the mind.”91 Decades later, the Baltimore Afro-American paid tribute to General Máximo Gómez, a leader of the Cuban insurrection against Spanish colonialism, by observing, “The brave and courageous words of Gomez bring before us the noble figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture.”92 Black writers urged their audiences to understand that the liberty had reached its summit not in the United States but in Haiti.93

  Frederick Douglass spoke about the Haitian Revolution at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Douglass presented Haiti as the original beacon of liberty in the Americas. His audience responded affirmatively:

  Speaking for the Negro, I can say, we owe much to Walker for his appeal; to John Brown [applause] for the blow struck at Harper’s Ferry, to Lundy and Garrison for their advocacy [applause], We owe much especially to Thomas Clarkson [applause], to William Wilberforce, to Thomas Fowell Buxton, and to the anti-slavery societies at home and abroad; but we owe incomparably more to Haiti than to them all. [Prolonged applause.] I regard her as the original pioneer emancipator of the nineteenth century. [Applause.]94

  Douglass’s homage to Haiti reaffirmed what too many would forget in subsequent generations: the Haitian Revolution was the inspiration for the pursuit of liberty in the Americas.

  In the nineteenth century, slavery was understood to be the cornerstone of American exceptionalism. The proslavery New York Daily News mocked slavery’s detractors as not understanding the foundations of American business prosperity: “If slavery was so great a sin, how comes it that through its agency this country attained the greatest amount of prosperity in the shortest space of time any nation ever attained?”95 The pursuit of profit at the expense of Black lives was the central theme in early US history. As C. L. R. James, an Afro-Trinidadian historian, observed, “Negro slavery seemed the very basis of American capitalism.”96 The single-minded pursuit of wealth and power launched by the Patriot leaders and their descendants engulfed the continent in a series of violent conflicts culminating in the bloodiest civil war in human history.97

  In the wake of the Haitian Revolution, African Americans envisioned a new kind of freedom that transcended national borders. They urged the opening of a global liberation front. Emancipatory internationalism gained momentum as the abolition of slavery spread throughout the world, and as Black organizers strengthened ties with activists outside of the United States. William Whipper, a key Black abolitionist, credited the activity of the oppressed in their own behalf—not the enlightenment of the British—with abolition in the Caribbean:

  How was the emancipation of the slave, and the enfranchisement of the free colored people effected there? We unhesitatingly affirm, that it was chiefly through the influence of colored men—the oppressed; by that restless discontentment that changed deeply injured slaves into insurgent runaways, by that manly bearing and living purpose, with which the free people of color contended for their rights, and which, especially in Jamaica, led the noble [Edward] Jordan and his compeers to some of the most daring and heroic acts in the annals of the race; which confer honor upon the people who seconded him, and which ultimately will give him an emblazoned immortality.98

  For African Americans and their abolitionist allies, the antislavery movement did not begin or end in the United States; it was conceived of most broadly as an anti-imperial cause. The National Anti-Slavery Standard opined, “Slavery kills; it commits adultery; it steals; it bears false witness; it covets Texas, Mexico, and Indian Territory, all that is its neighbors, and says aloud—perish all the commandments.”99 As the battle against slavery caught fire across the Americas, the people of Mexico prepared to strike a blow against the Spanish Empire, while their counterparts in the United States fine-tuned the praxis of resistance.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE MEXICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE AND US HISTORY

  ANTI-IMPERIALISM AS A WAY OF LIFE, 1820s TO 1850s

  In the summer of 1815, José María Morelos, leader of the Mexican War of Independence, wrote to President James Madison requesting the support of the United States in his people’s struggle against Spanish colonialism. A former arriero (mule driver) and Roman Catholic priest turned revolutionary general, Morelos, a man of African, Indigenous, and European descent, had presented “Los Sentimientos de la Nación” at the historic National Constituent Congress in Chilpancingo in southern Mexico. The “Feelings of the Nation” called for the abolition of slavery and for an end to the de jure caste oppression of Indigenous people as well as independence from Spain.1 “Los Sentimientos” banned torture, forbade military invasions of other nations, promised the “education of the poor,” and was the banner that the barefoot armies of African, Indigenous, and mestizo guerrilla fighters carried in their war of liberation.2

  The axioms presented in “Los Sentimientos” were a rejection of three centuries of European colonialism. Just a few years earlier the German explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt had described the racial caste system of New Spain that Morelos and his soldiers were now risking their lives to overthrow: “In a country governed by whites, the families reputed to have the least mixture of Negro or mulatto blood are also naturally the most honored. In Spain it is almost a title of nobility to descend neither from Jews nor Moors. In America the greater or less degree of whiteness of skin decides the rank which man occupies in society. A white who rides barefooted on horseback thinks he belongs to the nobility of the country.”3 As a priest, Morelos had engaged in an act of resistance during the 1804 padron (census) by refusing to categorize people by race.4

  Morelos, Miguel Hidalgo, Vicente Guerrero, and their comrades recruited fighters to the Mexican War of Independence by invoking the ideals of “civil rights and racial equality.”5 The war began on September 16, 1810, and “the first addition which he [Morelos] received to this force, on arriving on the coast, was a numerous band of slaves from Petatlán, and other towns, eager to purchase their liberty on the field of battle: arms were, however, so scarce, that twenty muskets, which were discovered in Petatlán, were considered as a most invaluable acquisition.”6 This insurgency was condemned by royalist leaders in New Spain as “an uprising against the rich people.”7 While some elite leaders—like their counterparts in the United States—schemed to maintain their suzerainty over the rest of the society in the transition to independence, “the peasants and workers who formed the bulk of the insurgent ranks had very different goals, such as access to land and improved working conditions.”8 The royalist general Félix María Calleja wrote to King Ferdinand that Morelos’s soldiers wished for “the Independence of the country, and the proscription of all the Europeans, whom they detest.”9 Morelos seized every opportunity to publicly denounce slavery as well as caste repression against Indigenous people; his troops revered him for his moral and physical courage. Morelos’s education to the priesthood gave him educational advantages his soldiers could only dream of; according to one chronicler in the Negro Digest, however, “He had not forgotten the 20-odd years spent as an unlettered mule driver. . . . He never became so well educated that the poor and uneducated peasants could not understand him and he them.”10 Awed at his adversary’s ingenuity and the morale of José Morelos’s fatally outgunned troops at the Siege of Cuautla in 1812, General Calleja called Morelos “a second Mahomet.”11

  José María Morelos attempted to gain President James Madison’s support for the cause of Mexican independence against the Spanish Empire. But how could this priest turned battle-hardened general fighting to abolish caste
oppression connect with Madison, a political philosopher who refused to end slavery in his own new nation? Morelos opened his communication with Madison by reminding Madison of America’s own independence struggle by foregrounding the evils of European colonialism, writing:

  Dear Sir: The Mexican people, tired of suffering under the enormous weight of the Spanish domination, and forever losing their hope of being happy under the government of their conquerors, broke the dikes of moderation, and braving difficulties and dangers that seemed insurmountable for those of an enslaved colony, raised the cry of liberty and courageously undertook the work of their regeneration.12

  José Morelos urged President Madison to see that the Mexican people were following in the footsteps of the Thirteen Colonies in their desperate battle for freedom:

  I could not forsake the obvious Justice of our cause, nor abandon the righteousness and purity of our intentions aimed exclusively for the good of humanity: we trust in the spirit and enthusiasm of our patriots who are determined to die first rather than return to the offensive yoke of slavery; and finally we trusted in the powerful support of the United States, who has guided us wisely with example. . . . We have sustained for five years our fight, practically convincing ourselves that there is no power capable of subduing a people determined to save themselves from the horrors of tyranny.

  Morelos offered a vision of emancipatory internationalism to James Madison and asked the American statesman to imagine the combined power they could wield against all foreign enemies: “The sincerity and philanthropic spirit that characterize both Nations: the ease and speed that they can mutually communicate their assistance to each other: the beautiful bond that will result between the two peoples, the one privileged by fertility and productions so rich and varied from its soil, and the other distinguished by its industry, by its culture, and by its genius.” This potential alliance between “the North Americas and Mexicana,” in the words of Morelos, would make the two peoples “invincible to the aggressions of greed, ambition, and tyranny.”13 José María Morelos’s efforts to recruit Madison to support the Mexican War of Independence represented a moment of unparalleled opportunity for the United States to place itself on the side of liberty for all—not just in its rhetoric, but in its actions.

  “SOUTH AMERICAN LIBERTY”

  If Mexico’s looming abolition of slavery disturbed US leaders, rebellions of African Americans and Native Americans in Spanish Florida terrified them. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams gave the pretext for launching the First Seminole War (1816–19) by claiming that during the War of 1812, British commanders in Florida “in their invitations and promises to the slaves to run away from their masters and join them, did not confine themselves to the slaves of the United States. They received with as hearty a welcome, and employed with equal readiness, the fugitives from their masters in Florida as those from Georgia.”14 John Quincy Adams frequently clashed with General Andrew Jackson in the political conflicts of the early republic; however, Adams agreed with the general on the need to secure the nation’s southern borders against the threat of slave revolt.15

  Adams denigrated the insurgencies in Latin America in letters to his family as well as in his diplomatic correspondence with Spain. These missives illuminate the attitude of Secretary Adams on race, democracy, and citizenship. Adams contrasted the American Revolution, which he characterized as a “war of freemen,” with the Latin American wars of independence:

  The struggle in South-America, is savage and ferocious almost beyond example. It is not the tug of war between Greek and Greek, but the tyger-conflict between Spaniard and Spaniard—The Cause has never been the same in any two of the revolting Colonies—Independence has not even been the pretext during great part of the time—Sometimes they have fought for Ferdinand; sometimes for the Cortes—Sometimes for Congresses and Constitutions, and sometimes for particular leaders, like Morales [sic] Hidalgo, Artigas, or Bolivar—The resemblance between this Revolution and ours is barely superficial. In all their leading characters the two Events, present a contrast, instead of a parallel—Ours was a War of freemen, for political Independence—This is a War of Slaves against their masters—It has all the horrors and all the atrocities of a servile War.16

  Adams revealingly compared the Latin American wars of independence with the Servile Wars, slave revolts in the late Roman Republic, which according to the historian Plutarch contributed to its fall.17 The future president of the United States told his father, John Adams, that while some Americans sympathized with the wars of independence in South America, the Latin American insurgents “by their internal elements of the exterminating war between black and white, present to us the prospect of very troublesome and dangerous associates, and still more fearful allies. Such are the ingredients of the caldron, which will soon be at boiling heat [italics in original].”18

  For John Quincy Adams, General Andrew Jackson served as the perfect weapon to keep the caldron from boiling over. As secretary of state, Adams made expansion of the nation’s borders one of his foremost goals. Adams defended Jackson’s controversial conduct in the First Seminole War, including his summary execution of two British subjects because, as Adams told George William Erving, the US minister to Spain, they had “invited by public proclamations, all the runaway negroes, all the savage Indians, all the pirates and all the traitors to their country, whom they knew or imagined to exist within reach of their summons, to join their standard, and wage an exterminating war against the portion of the United States immediately bordering upon this neutral and thus violated territory of Spain.”19 Adams instructed Erving to explain to the Spanish government that Jackson’s destruction of the Negro Fort on the Apalachicola River was necessary because the redoubt had become a “receptacle for fugitive slaves and malefactors, to the great annoyance of the United States and of Spanish Florida.”20

  While negotiating the treaty that allowed the United States to acquire Florida (Florida became a state in 1845), Secretary Adams used the language of empire in explaining his country’s military conduct to Spain.21 Adams claimed that the African American and Native American men, women, and children who peopled the Negro Fort were engaged in a “savage, servile, exterminating war against the United States.”22 Leaders of the early American republic were concerned with the destabilizing effect of African and Indigenous resistance on slavery’s southeastern frontier; the US “international” border was at Georgia’s southern border. Adams railed at what he called the Negro Fort’s “fugitive slaves and Indian outlaws; these perfidies and treacheries of villains incapable of keeping their faith even to each other; all in the name of South American liberty, of the rights of runaway negroes, and the wrongs of savage murderers all combined and projected to plunder Spain of her province, and to spread massacre and devastation along the borders of the United States.” Adams lectured Erving that although outsiders may have judged Jackson’s prosecution of the war in Florida to be extreme, “The justification of these principles is found in their salutary efficacy for terror and for example. It is thus only that the barbarities of the Indians can be successfully encountered.”23

  John Quincy Adams’s rationale for waging war to protect the United States from the dangers of “South American liberty” reveals much about race and the political ideology of the United States. Adams’s denigration of the Mexican War of Independence demonstrates that a central motivation for US imperial expansion into the West—the concept of manifest destiny—was that it would preempt the threat of revolt in the United States and keep the institution of slavery intact.24 At the same time, Adams disparaged Mexicans as inferior—he could not accept that they were capable of waging a genuine war of independence. His point of view would have shocked José María Morelos and those who fought for liberation from European colonialism and an end to slavery—all without plotting to annihilate their former masters. Adams racialized people in Mexico and Latin America in ways that would haunt their descendants in the United States well into the twenty-first
century. José Morelos’s vision of a “beautiful bond” between Mexico and the United States was doomed by the imperatives of racial capitalism. When the most powerful leaders in the early republic era looked to what we now call the Global South, they saw disorder; they could not accept that the region’s people were the equals of the heirs of the American Revolution. What scholars call the “racialization” of Mexican Americans in the nineteenth century was rooted in the imperatives of imperial slavery.25

  Shortly after negotiating the Adams-Onis Treaty in 1819, which allowed the United States to acquire Florida, Adams helped to frame the Monroe Doctrine. The goal was to aid US investors in the island’s sugar plantations by keeping the British Royal Navy from interfering with slavery in Cuba.26 While armies of liberation were dismantling slavery all throughout Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine gave the slave trade a new lease on life in Cuba. Once again, Adams invoked the specter of race to argue that Cubans were incapable of fighting a genuine war of independence.27 Adams warned that there was much to fear from Cuban independence, especially the possibility that a slave rebellion in Cuba could potentially destabilize slavery in the United States. Race and trade trumped all other considerations in Secretary Adams’s diplomatic mind.28 In a rush to expand the frontiers of slavery and racial capitalism, James Madison, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams foreclosed the possibility of cooperation with the independence movements in Latin America and the Caribbean.