Boyer keeps black officials out of office and schooling for the elite

Jean-Pierre Boyer governed Haiti from 1818 to 1843 and reunified the whole island under his presidency in 1820. Contemporaries and later historians called his rule obscurantist, since it opposed the instruction of the mass of the population, and also military, autocratic and racially exclusive. Black officials were pushed out of administrative work and out of power. Schooling stayed with the light-skinned families of the elite. Under him the mainly mulatto fraction of the old free population consolidated itself as the ruling group and as the local relay of foreign commerce, taking hold of the port trade, specialising in ground rent and urban property, and leaving agriculture to blacks of every class. When the crisis came the sides failed to line up by colour. Against Boyer stood mulatto liberals speaking for landowners and merchants, black domaniers attacking mulatto hegemony as such, northern separatists, old followers of Christophe, and disappointed Boyerists inside the civil service.

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.

The federal census of 1820 counted twenty seven thousand one hundred and seventy six people in New Orleans, of whom thirteen thousand five hundred and eighty four were white and six thousand two hundred and thirty seven were free people of colour. Perhaps eight to nine thousand of the whites and four and a half to five thousand of the free people of colour belonged to the French speaking part of the city. Newcomers from Saint-Domingue by way of Cuba made up close to a fifth of the white French speakers and about a third of the French speaking free people of colour. That puts roughly seventeen hundred white and sixteen hundred free coloured arrivals still living in New Orleans eleven years after they landed, which is close to two thirds of the whites and half of the free people of colour the mayor had counted in 1809. The marriage registers of the cathedral point the same way. Most of them stayed.