John Baur follows Fabre Nicolas Geffrard from the day in 1859 when he struck the abandoned crown of Faustin Soulouque with a gavel to his flight to Kingston eight years later. Consular despatches, British state papers, contemporary journalism and Haitian historians give him a president who opened new ports, founded legations, cut discriminatory duties and won a commercial treaty and recognition from Washington in 1862, while the American Civil War lifted cotton prices high enough to pay for a brief prosperity. Land policy and the scheme to settle African American farmers went badly, since most newcomers died, left or refused field labour. Baur puts the collapse down to temperament as much as circumstance, describing a conciliator who answered opposition first with amnesties and then with censorship, executions and a packed assembly, and who finally lost his own palace guard to the revolt behind Sylvain Salnave.