An English architect draws the drums of Congo Square

Benjamin Henry Latrobe, an English architect working in New Orleans, watched the Sunday gathering at Congo Square in 1815 and drew what was in front of him. His drawings record three distinct African drums: the conga and the ogororo, both of Yoruba type, and an open staved drum of the Dahomean kind. That is physical evidence of who was playing and what they played on, at a date when nothing else in the United States documented African instruments with such precision. The drums are the point. Rhythm is how the spirits are summoned in Vodou. Each lwa answers to particular beats, and a drummer who knows them can bring a spirit into the body of a dancer in front of a crowd. What an educated visitor took for a picturesque public amusement was the working machinery of a religion, running in the open under a legal exemption written for Catholic observance.

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.

Girard follows the losing side of independence. Thousands of angry cultivators refused incorporation into Dessalines's army and chose instead to ally with the French commander Rochambeau, and even after the evacuation he went on fighting renegade bands numbering between fifteen hundred and four thousand, one of which called itself the Rochambeau army. He captured and executed their most prominent leader, but lower class opposition to the new landowning elite did not disappear. It took state form in the independent territory that Jean-Baptiste Perrier, known as Goman, held in the south for fourteen years, and reappeared in the Piquet risings of the eighteen forties. The article treats this continuity as the real long term consequence of the labour policy Dessalines had enforced first for Louverture and then for France.

Driven out of New Granada by the royalists in May and sheltered for eight months in Jamaica under the patronage of Maxwell Hyslop, Bolivar was introduced by Hyslop to Sutherland, who guaranteed him substantial assistance from Haiti. He accepted, sailed, and was met at the quayside by Sutherland. He said he wanted to fit out a force and return to the mainland as soon as possible. A meeting with Petion was arranged for the following day and the president, pleased to have him on the island, promised full support. Within a matter of days Bolivar had arms, ships and men. Lewis notes that he also asked the naval commander Luis Aury, then coming back from royalist held Cartagena, for his vessels, and that Aury refused and went to Galveston to prepare his own Mexican venture instead. Where this account departs from the standard one: Some historians hold that Bolivar was bound for Cartagena and turned to Haiti only on hearing it had fallen; Lewis argues his letters show he meant to go to Haiti from the start.