Lecture on Haiti (1893)

AUTHOR: Douglass, Frederick
PUBLICATION: “Lecture on Haiti. The Haitian Pavilion. Dedication Ceremonies Delivered at the World’s Fair, in Jackson Park, Chicago, Jan. 2d, 1893. By the Hon. Frederick Douglass, Ex-Minister to Haiti.” Chicago: The Violet Agents Supply, 1893.
https://www.loc.gov/item/02012340/

This is the lecture Douglass delivered at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. See also the versions of manuscript and typescript drafts and fragments held by the Library of Congress: “Haiti.” n. date. Frederick Douglass Papers. Library of Congress.
https://findingaids.loc.gov/index.html

KEYWORDS: animals, nation, race, slavery

 

In this speech, Douglass reflects on Haiti’s history and development from a slave colony to an independent republic and argues in favor of improving U.S. diplomatic relations with Haiti.

As he does elsewhere, Douglass equates the practice of chattel slavery with a general propensity to violence, towards both humans and other animals. In this case, he suggests that the violent treatment of working animals – such as mules used to transport commercial goods – illustrates the legacy of slavery in Haiti. As Douglass explains, the “coffee, cotton, log-wood, mahogany and lignum-vitae” produced in Haiti is either transported by women (13) or “brought down from the mountains on donkeys, mules, small horses and horned cattle. In the management of these animals we see in Haiti a cruelty inherited from the old slave system. They often beat them unmercifully” (14). This, together with what Douglass identified as Haitian men’s propensity to drinking and gambling (14), is among the societal challenges Haiti still faces. The violent treatment of animals is at odds with Douglass’s agricultural ideal, which he outlines in earlier speeches delivered to farmers in Tennessee (1873) and in North Carolina (1881). For Douglass, a moral and economically successful agricultural model is contingent on peaceful and kind treatment of farmed animals.

In an undated draft of his lecture on Haiti (“Haiti,” Library of Congress, 3/14), Douglass mentions that the island “is not only friendly to vegetable life, but it is also friendly to animal life. Horses, sheep, swine, goats and fine cattle may, in favourable localities, flourish and reach a high degree of perfection” (image 1). This statement underscores the continued exploitation of nonhuman animals for human purposes through breeding, yet Douglass uses the lexicon of ethical treatment (“friendly”) to draw attention to how climate and geography influence the well-being of animals.