Twenty-six heads of state in 111 years and only one of them a civilian

In a footnote that carries much of his argument, Gerlus tallies the chiefs of state between independence and the American landing. Of twenty-six, exactly one was a civilian, Michel Oreste, and he lasted less than a year. In the body of the article he describes what these men were: generals largely by virtue of their epaulettes, ruling with a heavy hand, writing their own constitutions and functioning as the law. He traces the pattern back to the war itself, which made military leaders the celebrated figures of a liberated population and made the word general a term of respect for any man of wealth or unusual power in the society. The permanent expectation that France would return to retake the island kept martial authority legitimate. Since control of the state was the direct route to the country's resources, the state stayed an arena of struggle and of repression.

Holman Bentley finished the Kikongo New Testament in 1893. Four centuries had passed since the king of the Kongo was first baptised, and in all that time no gospel had been put into the language, though a catechism had. Bentley worked closely with a young man called Nlemvo, whom the mission regarded as its first convert and who, Bentley wrote, helped him with all his literary work. Nlemvo's uncle, the man who had brought him to the mission as a boy, kept a small brass crucifix he prayed before and had it fixed to the wall by his bed when he was dying. He was known by a Kikongo word meaning believer, a recognised category of person who required crosses and holy water at a funeral. Twice at Sao Salvador, Bentley recalled, someone stood up after the sermon to tell the congregation to listen, because this was what their old relatives had told them.

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.