MacLeod sets out to unsettle the received portrait of Faustin Soulouque as a dull-witted tyrant whose twelve years in power were an embarrassing interruption in Haitian life. That portrait comes largely from French and American writers, and it leaves obvious puzzles unanswered: how a supposed nonentity outmanoeuvred the senators who elected him in 1847 expecting a figurehead, and why he lasted so long when abler presidents fell within months.

Reading consular dispatches, the government press and nineteenth-century Haitian historians, MacLeod finds a shrewd politician rather than a caricature. Soulouque struck at black extremists as readily as at the Port-au-Prince elite, promoted mulatto talent, and treated his imperial nobility as a cheap way of binding generals, merchants, piquet chiefs and Vodoun leaders to the regime. His campaigns against the Dominican Republic followed convictions his predecessors had shared.

The essay is offered as a prompt to rethink Haiti's recurring strongmen, not as a settled account of them.