Faustin Soulouque comes down in the histories as a dullard raised by accident and corrupted by power. MacLeod tests that portrait against United States and British consular dispatches, the Moniteur Haitien, contemporary French journalism and Haitian historians, and finds a shrewd politician. He reconstructs a sequence of moves: destroy the Port-au-Prince elite that expected to manage him, then break the black leaders who had helped him do it, then bind everyone of influence to the regime through an imperial nobility that cost the treasury little, then turn to defending the country abroad. Vodou clergy were drawn into that coalition, a first among Haitian rulers. The invasions of the Dominican Republic followed from a fear that a weak neighbour would invite European or United States possession of Hispaniola. Defeat in 1855 and 1856 ended the regime's momentum. MacLeod closes by noting how closely François Duvalier's methods track Soulouque's.