There was once a slave ... : $b The heroic story of Frederick DouglassDu Bois, Shirley Graham
History
There was once a slave ... : $b The heroic story of Frederick Douglass
Du Bois, Shirley Graham
Douglass, Frederick, 1818-1895
Not the least, perhaps, among the collateral causes of our non-success
was the minatory attitude assumed by us while conducting the
negotiation. What wisdom was there in confronting Haiti at such a
moment with a squadron of large ships of war with a hundred cannon and
two thousand men? This was done, and it was naturally construed into a
hint to Haiti that if we could not, by appeals to reason and friendly
feeling, obtain what we wanted, we could obtain it by a show of force.
We appeared before the Haitians, and before the world, with the pen
in one hand and the sword in the other. This was not a friendly and
considerate attitude for a great government like ours to assume when
asking a concession from a small and weak nation like Haiti. It was
ill-timed and out of all proportion to the demands of the occasion. It
was also done under a total misapprehension of the character of the
people with whom we had to deal. We should have known that, whatever
else the Haitian people may be, they are not cowards, and hence are
not easily scared.
Frederick Douglass was blamed for the failure of the negotiations. He
did resign the summer of 1891.
Logan says, “My own belief is that Douglass was sincerely desirous of
protecting the interests of a country of the same race as his, while at
the same time carrying out the wishes of his government and upholding
the integrity of that government. His failure was due rather to the
fact that there was no real public demand for the Môle, that Harrison
was not prepared to use force.... After all, the Panama Canal had not
been built; the United States had not even obtained her release from
the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty so that she could construct a canal under
her own control. The use of force against Haiti had to wait until the
canal had been constructed, until the United States had become a world
power, until a new period of recurrent revolutions had increased the
impatience in the State Department, and until the attention fixed
upon the World War permitted the military occupation of Haiti without
arousing too much protest in the United Sates.”[34]
In 1893 the Haitian government appointed Douglass Haiti’s Commissioner
to the World Columbian Exposition at Chicago; and in 1899 Haiti
contributed the first thousand dollars toward the bronze statue
of Frederick Douglass now standing in one of the public parks of
Rochester. Speaking in 1932, Dantes Bellegarde, Haitian Minister to
the United States, expressed the belief that were Frederick Douglass
still living he “would be among those who most ardently approved the
doctrine of international morality.... A policy respectful of the
rights of small nations such as had been exemplified in the activities
of Douglass while United States Minister in Haiti, is the only policy
capable of assuring to a powerful nation like the United States the
real and profound sympathy of the states of Latin America.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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