Vermonters in Haiti
by Elise A. Guyette
In February, the Peace & Justice Center sponsored an event related to the history of Haiti. As a follow-up, this article is about two Black men with connections to Vermont who were prominent in the new nation as it struggled to survive after the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). Through this revolution, they won freedom for all enslaved people on the island, and the people who had emancipated themselves created the world’s first Black republic. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when colonizationists[1] were advocating for removing African-descended people from the U.S. to Liberia, some who wished to leave the US, including people from Vermont, chose Haiti instead.
One of these emigrees, Prince Saunders, grew up in Thetford, Vermont. Born during the American Revolution, he later gained fame in Haiti organizing schools, introducing vaccinations, and writing Haiti’s criminal code. Another was James T. Holly, who was a shoemaker in Burlington according to the 1850 Federal Census Report. He later immigrated to Hait as the missionary bishop for the Episcopal Church.
Prince Saunders (c1775–1839), who grew up as an indentured servant in Thetford, Vermont first appeared in the public records in 1784, when he was baptized there at nine years old. He was a member of the household of a white lawyer, George O. Hinkley, who sent him to local schools and later sponsored him at Moor’s Charity School at Dartmouth College, class of 1808. President John Wheelock was impressed with the young man and praised him to a Unitarian minister who asked him to go to Boston to work with Black students there. Saunders soon persuaded a wealthy white man, Abiel Smith, to bequeath thousands of dollars for four African American schools in Boston. One school was named the Abiel Smith School, which is now the Museum of African American History.
At one of those schools, Saunders met Thomas Paul, a Baptist minister. In 1815, Saunders and Paul sailed to London to meet abolitionists William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson to discuss abolition efforts in the two countries. While on board, Saunders befriended the sons of John Quincy Adams, the U.S. minister to Britain at the time. Adams’s sons were 14 and 11 years old, and Saunders frequently visited his new young friends in London. Saunders spent many hours taking the children around the city and often dined with the Adams’ family. At one point Saunders asked Adams for advice about “his project of going to St. Domingo (Hayti)— The primary object is to introduce the systems of schooling … into that Island.” [2] Emperor Henri Christophe, Saunders said, was earnest for the establishment of schools within his territory in the northern part of Haiti.
In 1816 Saunders emigrated to Haiti to set up a school system for Christophe and often returned to London for school supplies and teachers. There people thought he was a Prince (he did not correct them) and treated him like royalty. On one of his trips, Saunders brought back smallpox vaccinations for the people of Haiti. From that point on he spent much of the rest of his life inducing Black people to join him in Haiti, “the paradise of the New World”, to escape the oppressive racism and prejudice of America. “[3] While there he translated and edited the Haytian Papers (1816), a history of the laws and official documents of the Haitian governemnt. In the preface, he declared he produced the book to show the intelligence and skills of Black people:
Having understood that it has often been insinuated by those few individuals, whose habitual labour is the perversion, … the absolute destruction of every object which has the tendency to show that the Blacks possess that portion of natural intelligence which the beneficent Father of all ordinarily imparts to His children; … such persons have endeavored to impress the public with the idea, that those official documents which have occasionally appeared in this country, are not written by black Haytians themselves; but that they are either written by Europeans in this country, or by some who, they say, are employed for that purpose in the public offices of Hayti; and, for the entire refutation of this gross misrepresentation, I upon my honour declare … that all the public documents are written by those of the King’s secretaries whose names they bear, and that they are all black men, or men of color.[4]
After the revolution, one goal was to impress on the world that Black people were just as capable, intelligent, and skillful as whites, and that they could run the country in fine fashion. Toward that end, Saunders published a second edition of the Haytian Papers in 1818 and toured the northern U.S. on a talking tour to entice Black people to immigrate to Haiti. In 1820, he had a ship ready to leave from Philadelphia with many emigrants on board when he got word that the army rebelled against Christophe ending that era. Saunders stayed in Philadelphia to escape the rebellion. However, within the year he returned to Hayti because of the oppressive prejudice in the United States. The new president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, made him Attorney General, the post he held until his death in Port-au-Prince in 1839.
James Theodore Holly (1829-1911).
In the 1850 federal census for Burlington, Jane Holly appeared with her sons and a boarder. Jane (1789-1861) was 61 years of age and did not live to see the end of slavery in her country. Her sons were Joseph 25 (1825-1855) and James 21[5]. Joseph Garrison, a 22- year-old laborer, was boarding with them. The Holly brothers were shoemakers, a craft learned from their father, who died in 1844 in Washington DC. They found Burlington “somewhat” better than DC.
We know that the Holly brothers made shoes & boots in Burlington for a living, but they also held debates around town. In 1850, while in Burlington, James wrote a letter to Mr. McClain of the American Colonization Society saying: “I have succeeded in creating quite a spirit of inquiry in relation to Colonization amongst my associates here … by debating the following question with my brother, before several meetings, ‘Can the colored people of the U.S. best elevate their condition by remaining in this country, or by emigrating to Liberia?’ He supported the first proposition from earnest conviction, and in like manner I advocated the latter.”[6]
James said that for the past 5 yrs, he had traveled throughout New England, the Middle & Northwestern states, and Canada and talked to “free colored men” from almost every slave state and knows many are ready to go. However, many rejected African colonization to Liberia and decided to migrate to Haiti, which had the first Black republic in the western hemisphere. James wrote:
The blacks have a most inveterate prejudice against being separated from the New World, that has been the field of their labors and sufferings for the past three centuries. It is hard even to leave the very spot on which they chanced to be born, for they are a very domestic race, and strong in their local attachments. Nevertheless, they will easily reconcile themselves to the irresistible fate of local separation from the whites of this country, when they can locate on the same continent, within a few days sail of the scenes of their nativity. This … would make the blacks feel as if they had not lost their homes with us; and, therefore would render them contented and happy with their lot. This can never be the case with African colonization, since by this scheme they are not only expatriated from their country but are also exiled from our Western World.[7]
In 1851, James Holly left the Catholic Church in which he was raised, because the church refused to ordain Black clergy, and he joined the Episcopal Church. He also married a Vermont woman, Charlotte, whose maiden name has not been discovered. In reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, James and Charlotte Holly later moved to Windsor, Canada but soon returned to the US to New Haven, CT. By 1858, James was the ordained rector of St Luke’s in New Haven where he served until 1861.
That year, Holly and his family migrated from New Haven to Haiti with 110 men, women and children. During their first year in Haiti, they experienced great pain: James’s mother Jane, his wife Charlotte, two of their children, and thirty-nine others died of malaria, typhoid or yellow fever. James stayed and in 1862 become a Haitian citizen. In 1874 he was consecrated the missionary bishop of Haiti, becoming the first African American Bishop in Episcopal Church history.[8] He soon married Sarah Henley, and they eventually had nine children. The Right Reverend James Theodore Holly James died and was buried in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on March 13, 1911.
In 1936, 25 years after his death, the Haitian government gave him its highest honor: Commander in the National Order of Honor and Merit. On March 13, 2008, Holy Trinity Cathedral in Port-au-Prince, Haiti held a solemn commemoration to remember the 97th anniversary of the death of its first bishop, Jacques (James) Theodore Holly.[9] He is included among the saintly persons on the calendar of “Lesser Feasts and Fasts.” Every year on March 13, the church remembers him. Members of the Holly family still reside in Haiti.[10]
It’s past time for Vermont to remember him too, along with Prince Saunders.
[1] People who believed in anti-slavery but were also racists who wanted all Black people to colonize Liberia in Africa, to remove people of color from the United States.
[2] Gwen Fries (2023). “An American Prince in London: John Quincy Adams Meets Prince Saunders,” in The Beehive (MA Historical Society). Online: https://www.masshist.org/beehiveblog/2023/02/an-american-prince-in-london-john-quincy-adams-meets-prince-saunders/
[3] White, Arthur (1975). “Prince Saunders: An Instance of Social Mobility Among Antebellum New England Blacks.” The Journal of Negro History 60, no. 4 (October): 532.
[4] Prince Saunders, Editor (1816). Haytian Papers (London : W. Reed Law Bookseller), p3. Online: https://books.google.com/books?id=pdY-AAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
[5] There was an older daughter, Cecilia, born in 1823. What little we know of her is at https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/154644140/person/122111252758/facts?_phsrc=9ji847062&_phstart=successSource.
[6] Carter G. Woodson (1969). The Mind of the Negro As Reflected in Letters. NY: Negro Universities Press, 127. The letter was dated 9-30-1850.
[7] Woodson, The Mind of the Negro, 496-97.
[8] The consecration of Holly as the first black bishop of the Episcopal Church (and Samuel David Ferguson in 1885 as the Bishop of Liberia) set precedents for change in only underdeveloped overseas areas where competition from white episcopate candidates did not exist. Assignments of Black ministers to the domestic episcopate did not occur until the next century. See https://episcopalarchives.org/church-awakens/exhibits/show/divergence/episcopal-passage
[9] See “The Day of Theodore Holly” at http://monasteryroad.blogspot.com/2008/04/day-of-theodore-holly.html
[10] Other sources for Rev. James Holly: J.C. Hayden (1988), “From Holly to Turner: Black Bishops in the American Succession,” Linkage, 10, 4-6. James Theodore Holly (1857). “A vindication of the capacity of the negro race for self- government, and civilized progress, as demonstrated by historical events of the Haytian revolution; and the subsequent acts of that people since their national independence.” New Haven, CT: The Afric-American Printing Co. For full text: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t44q8q73p&view=1up&seq=9&skin=2021. Also see H. Lewis (1996). Yet with A Steady Beat, Trinity Press International, Valley Forge, PA.