An emergency sale of state land becomes a general auction

Manigat follows a measure presented as exceptional as it turns into a policy. In his message to the Senate of 18 February 1812 the president of the Republic proposed alienating a number of urban lots and sugar estates for the benefit of the treasury, framing it as an urgent and exceptional step. It was the first stage in a sequence of four laws running from 1812 to 1814. The law of 16 to 22 March 1812 authorised the sale of all vacant lots in the national domain and eighteen sugar estates, of which eight lay fallow; thirty-two lots at Port-au-Prince, Leogane, Petit-Goave, Jacmel and Miragoane and eighteen estates in the Cul-de-Sac and Leogane plains were put out to tender. The law of 7 November 1812 added twenty-one more, mostly in the Cayes plain, and that of 10 March 1814 some thirty sugar works, twenty coffee plantations and four cotton and cacao holdings. The law of 16 to 18 August 1814 then ordered the general sale of all state property.

Between May 1809 and January 1810 the mayor of New Orleans counted nine thousand and fifty nine people arriving from eastern Cuba, most of them out of Santiago de Cuba and Baracoa, with only one vessel coming from Havana. Further landings in the early months of 1810 carried the total past ten thousand. The mayor sorted them into the three legal categories that had governed Saint-Domingue and that also governed Louisiana. Two thousand seven hundred and thirty one were counted as white, three thousand one hundred and two as free people of colour, and three thousand two hundred and twenty six as slaves. The three groups were almost equal in size. Orleans Parish had held seventeen thousand people in 1806. The arrivals came to more than the entire growth of the white and enslaved populations of the parish between 1806 and 1810, and they roughly doubled the population of the city itself.

When a deputy at the Cortes of Cadiz proposed in 1811 to end slavery in Spain's colonies, the proposal travelled to the Caribbean as a report of an accomplished fact. Revolts and conspiracies followed in each of the Spanish Antilles and in Martinique across 1811 and 1812. Geggus records one district of Puerto Rico where the rumour fused with news from Haiti and Henry Christophe was cast as the monarch who would liberate them. Similar hybrids appear elsewhere, including a conspiracy in Maranhao in northeastern Brazil in 1827 in which British liberators were expected to invade on behalf of the King of Congo, and plots at Ponce in Puerto Rico in 1841 and in the Cuban Escalera affair of 1843 where help was awaited from Haiti and from abolitionists at the same time. Metropolitan reform reliably produced colonial insurrection by way of misreported news.

Garcia V was king of the Kongo from 1803 to 1830 and wanted a priest for the same reason his predecessors had, to perform the coronation and bless his marriage and so confirm his authority. He waited eleven years. In 1814 Luigi-Maria d'Assisi, the Capuchin prefect at Loanda, managed to spend eight months in the country, baptised twenty five thousand people, heard five thousand confessions, and on 17 March crowned and married Garcia and Queen Isabella. There had been no priest at Sao Salvador for twenty years. The delighted king wrote to his brother the King of Portugal, as Afonso I had learned to do three centuries earlier, and suggested the Pope make Luigi-Maria a cardinal. Garcia had sent a nephew to be educated in Loanda in 1803 and a son in 1809, insisting he must have a priest in the family; that son, Dom Pedro, was ordained in 1824.