The Code Henry builds courts, schools and compulsory labour together

Wilson describes the civil code Christophe promulgated as establishing a sovereign court of justice with ten district courts beneath it and smaller jurisdictions below those. Alongside it came a military penal code stricter than the one Dessalines had used, the establishment of Roman Catholicism as the state religion, provision for schooling through private schools and later imported foreign teachers with a royal academy funded at Cap-Henry, and a government printing house for official documents. The last decree was the rural code. Work was obligatory, agriculture came first because the king held that national prosperity depended on it, idleness was punished severely, and the royal guard known as the Dahomets supervised production. Wilson sets out the terms without softening them: freedom from slavery in the north arrived attached to a legal duty to farm, enforced by the king's own soldiers.

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.