Nineteenth-century Haitian politics was fought partly through rival accounts of the national past, and Nicholls traces how writers close to the mulatto elite built, in the two decades after 1847, a version of history designed to justify their claim to leadership. The black counter-legend provoked in reply would later be taken up by Price-Mars and the Griots and feed the rise of Duvalier.

Thomas Madiou's history, published from 1847, is the pivot. Though a mulatto himself, Madiou kept clear of the elite cliques, served under Soulouque, printed appendices recording the colour of everyone he named, and judged Dessalines and Christophe more generously than his peers thought decent. Beaubrun Ardouin and Joseph Saint-Remy wrote largely against him, and with Emile Nau, Celigny Ardouin and others set out an authorized version centred on Petion.

Nicholls likens this frankly practical use of the past to whig history, and to its political uses in the Soviet Union and in Africa.