Twenty six heads of state and not one governed with his own shade alone

Between 1804 and 1914 Haiti had twenty six heads of state. Jean Price-Mars went through the list and observed that not one of them had governed surrounded only by men of his own shade. He took this as evidence that the ruling strata interpenetrated each other, and that a logic of class had held them together across every rivalry and every divergence of interest, at the expense of the mass of the population. The century those presidencies cover contains the slow consolidation of mulatto hegemony at national level, its quarrels with the black fraction of the dominant classes, the alliances of both in putting down peasant risings, and the steady return of foreign capital, German, French and American. From the fall of Salomon in 1888 to the American landing in 1915 the colour question receded as an ideological weapon in the contest for the state, and the economic and political situation deteriorated without it.

On 4 November 1892 the women soldiers of Dahomey fought the French army at the gates of Cana. It was their last battle. The kingdom fell, and the French abolished the Dahomean monarchy in 1900. The date of the ending is exact, which is unusual, and the date of the beginning is not. Claims in the literature run from the reign of Wegbaja, who ruled somewhere between about 1640 and the early 1680s, to that of Glele, who ruled from 1858 to 1889. Most writers have credited either Agaja, king in the 1720s and 1730s, or Gezo, king from 1818 to 1858. Amelie Degbelo, who interviewed scores of Dahomeans for a thesis, found that ninety nine of every hundred named Gezo. He certainly enlarged the corps, hardened its training and armed it better. The women were called amazons by Europeans, and they were the standing infantry of a West African state.

On 18 August 1807 a woman called Louise dite Letort came into a notary's office in Santo Domingo city carrying a manumission act from the year 1739. The clerk recorded it as extremely damaged. It had freed her and her mother Rose sixty eight years earlier, and it stood between her and a government that was putting people back into slavery. She was not alone in making that calculation. Henriette dite Pommeau deposited papers on 28 June 1805 reconstructing a manumission granted around 1787, after losing her originals when rebels destroyed her home town. Margueritte Bonne went to a notary in Le Cap in December 1801 to certify an act of 1790 whose copy had burned in the great fire there in June 1793, then carried that certificate to Santiago and deposited it in August 1803. Freedom in this colony depended on whether a sheet of paper had survived a fire, a war and a sea crossing.

On 17 May 1809, with rumours running that as many as 6,000 white refugees were about to land, mayor James Mather asked the municipal council of New Orleans for emergency measures. He proposed moving the fish market to a vacant lot so that its five storerooms could house refugee families, collecting blankets for the destitute, and appointing a welfare committee to raise money and find work. The council agreed on 24 May. By August the committee had gathered and given out 5,000 dollars and was asking for a second subscription because people were still arriving. In the financial year that began on 1 May 1809 the residents of the city paid 7,650 dollars in taxes on real estate and enslaved people, at a rate of one dollar for every thousand dollars of property. The two French language papers, the Moniteur and the Courrier, ran letters presenting the newcomers as unfortunate planters and victims of war.