Migrating Mariners: African American Emigration from the Chesapeake Bay to Samaná Bay, 1824

Matt Randolph (Stanford University) will give a talked titled Migrating Mariners: African American Emigration from the Chesapeake Bay to Samaná Bay, 1824.

In this first chapter of my dissertation, I explore the dynamics that led to the migrations of free and enslaved Black people from the United States to Haiti. I assess the rationales and lived experiences behind this island-wide project of African American settlement, as imagined and advanced by the government of Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer, which had annexed the Spanish side of the island for a twenty-year period of unified administration (1822-1844). I place special attention on Boyer's call for maritime laborers in Samaná (a northeastern peninsula in what is now the Dominican Republic) given its strategic geopolitical position in the Caribbean sea. 

Retracing and reconstructing discourses and dynamics related to African American migration to Haiti from Maryland, this chapter also leverages Baltimore as a case study for better understanding the wider urban context of African American emigration, which also included Philadelphia and New York. Maryland resonates with the trajectory of African American migration to Haiti broadly, but it is also as a unique story in its own right given the coexistence of equally significant enslaved and free Black populations. Maryland’s status as a slaveholding state and fears of runaways escaping by sea distinguished Baltimore from northern port cities that sent free Black populations to the Caribbean. 

This chapter is part of a larger dissertation project titled "Harboring Freedom: Black Geographies, Atlantic Empires, and the Struggle for Samaná Bay, 1822-1898". The draft will be pre-circulated in advance of the workshop to those that register.