A Cuban spy poses as a smuggler and befriends Bolivar

Conditions in the Haitian capital were tightening. A French warship had arrived to blockade the port and stop rebel forces leaving, and its captain was reporting to Spanish officials in Cuba and promising to prevent Mina from sailing. Two weeks after Mina left, a Frenchman naturalised in Spain arrived from Cuba aboard a trading ship loaded with tobacco, sent by the captain general to spy on the expedition. Passing easily as a commercial agent selling contraband, he gained the confidence of both Sutherland and Bolivar within three days. With Mina gone he concentrated on Bolivar and collected a great deal about the plans for a second assault on the mainland. Lewis observes that had the man been sent to kill Bolivar he would have had little difficulty, since the two spent several days in each other's company. He simply gathered his information and left.

Around 1818 Adanzan, king of Dahomey, was removed by his younger brother Gezo and held in prison. Dahomey had no procedure for deposing a king, and one commentator wrote that to dethrone one was sacrilege and to replace him a sort of usurpation. The record shows the story being reworked in stages. A document of 1820 says only that the king of Dahomey has been deposed and his brother has taken the monarchy. In 1843 a French trader found people speaking of Adanzan with great caution while acknowledging the fact. Gezo's own singers at the annual customs of 1850 abused Adanzan by name as unfit to rule a warlike nation, which admits that he had ruled. After Gezo died in 1858 the account tightened. Richard Burton was told in 1864 that Adanzan had merely raised a mutiny. The court version recorded decades later made Gezo the designated heir all along and Adanzan a regent who would not hand over power.

Manigat opens by naming the historiographical obstacle. Haiti's first national historians, Madiou and Ardouin, agreed with different degrees of vehemence in stigmatising Christophe's regime as ferocious tyranny, painting it for posterity as a reign of arbitrariness and cruelty. Against that he proposes a category from European history: not a Haitian Ivan the Terrible but an enlightened despot, a ruler for whom progress is imposed from above by strong personal power because the mass of the governed is judged insufficiently educated to demand it. Christophe's education policy of 1806 to 1820 is presented in this frame, alongside Petion's agrarian policy of 1807 to 1818, as a school textbook exercise in seeing two contemporaries whole. Manigat insists that moving from legend to history is uncomfortable work and that the historian's job is to track the quarry rather than to please either camp. Where this account departs from the standard one: Rejects the portrait of Christophe as an arbitrary tyrant handed down by Madiou and Ardouin, reclassifying him as an enlightened despot.

Against the assumption that early Haitian authors were marginal, the essay lists dated notices for Vastey's works in the Baltimore Patriot in May 1815, the Boston Daily Advertiser that September, the Alexandria Gazette later the same month, the Christian Observer in December 1817, the Essex Register and the City of Washington Gazette in May 1818, the Vermont Gazette that June, the Daily National Intelligencer in February 1820, the American Beacon in December 1820, the North American Review and the Rhode Island American in February 1821, and the Essex Patriot in August 1821. Two German newspapers reprinted him in 1820 and 1825. The point of the catalogue is evidentiary. It establishes that the works of Vastey and Boisrond-Tonnerre remained part of the circulating historiography of the revolution in the Atlantic world at least until the end of the American Civil War.