Two constitutions naturalise people of African or Indian descent

Perry shows the analogy between aboriginal and African enslavement acquiring legal force. Both Alexandre Pétion's 1816 constitution and the post-Boyer constitution of 1843 allowed the immigration and naturalisation of individuals of either African or Indian descent. In this vision, she argues, Afro-diasporic Haitians and the descendants of the Taino could be indigenous at the same time, because the label above all designates a relation to Europeans as usurpers, a position that ought normatively to produce anticolonial alliance. She sets this beside Dessalines's address to the people after a failed expedition against French troops in the Spanish half of Hispaniola, in which he presumed that the indigènes espagnols, descendants of the Indians destroyed by the first usurpers of the island, would seize the chance to sacrifice to the spirits of their ancestors. That expectation was disappointed.

Garcia V died in 1830 and a Capuchin went up to Sao Salvador one last time to conduct the funeral. In the disorder that followed he could not crown a successor. He came back to Loanda with a Kongolese lay brother and found his last European colleague dead. The kingdom and the mission were ending together. Garcia's priest son left the Kongo for work in Angola, where there was no bishop between 1826 and 1852 and fewer than twenty priests. Italian diocesan clergy from Milan and a group of Swiss Benedictines both offered to go and revive the church there, and both offers were killed by Capuchin and Portuguese obstruction. In 1834 an anticlerical government in Lisbon ordered every convent closed and the Capuchin property was sold. Bernardo da Burgio sailed for Palermo in May 1835 with the mission archives and one companion, the Kongolese brother Bernardo of Sao Salvador.

On 1 August 1838 the abolition of slavery took full effect on the British island of Dominica and roughly fourteen thousand people stopped being property. An interim period of apprenticeship had run from 1834 and was supposed to ease owners and slaves into the new arrangement. It settled nothing. Dominica registered one of the lowest ratios of enslaved people to land anywhere in the British Caribbean, and for ecological and historical reasons the plantation had never dominated the island the way it dominated the older sugar colonies. Planters and officials could see what abundant land would mean, and from 1834 they had already brought in severe measures to keep apprentices on the estates. Once apprenticeship ended they used every method available to stop cultivators establishing holdings of their own. Most of the freed people could not read, and they spoke a French based creole rather than English, a survival from the period before Britain took the island in 1763. The fight over land and labour ran on for a century.

On Saturday 7 May 1842 the Septentrional fault in northern Hispaniola moved. Witnesses said the ground worked for several minutes and came in two distinct shocks, the second doing most of the harm. In Port-au-Prince people ran out of the downtown buildings into the streets, and the coat of arms above the Senate entrance fell and shattered, which onlookers read as a sign that the government would come down too. Tremors went on through the weekend, and a heavy one broke up mass on Sunday 8 May. Reports reached the capital from Puerto Plata, Gonaives and Saint-Marc, and from Falmouth in western Jamaica. A mountain near Saint-Marc was said to have split in two. James Hartwell, a British missionary in Port-au-Prince, wrote to England wondering why the capital had been spared. At Gonaives the government house, the arsenal, the treasury and the prison collapsed, sixty prisoners escaped, and a fire the next evening burned much of the rest.