Gezo deposes Adanzan and the deposition is slowly erased

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.

Dupuy describes the post-independence state as divided from the start between the older property-owning and slave-owning affranchis, usually called mulattoes although the group included Black members, and a newer Black property-owning class formed during Louverture's rule and after independence. Their fight for control of the state produced fourteen years of civil war before Boyer reunited the country. Dupuy's argument is about consequences rather than personalities. The factional conflict blocked any developmental project, and the class structure it left behind, a dominant class living off commerce, finance and import and export tied to the world market and the state, and a peasantry growing food and some export crops, made industrialisation impossible in the nineteenth century. That weakness is what let French, English, German and later American capital take a dominant position by the end of the century, in what he calls a neocolonial turn.

Haiti's secretary general B. Inginac wrote to the antislavery American James Tredwell inviting people of colour in the United States to emigrate to the republic. Tredwell, who had already visited Haiti, printed the letter in his 1818 book on the Haitian constitution, and the Niles Weekly Register republished it in October 1818 under a headline about people of colour. Daut contrasts the publicity here with the secrecy around Petion's support for Bolivar. Free soil was a doctrine the government wanted the Atlantic world to know about: anyone escaping slavery who reached Haitian ground was free, and the invitation extended that principle into an offer of citizenship for free Black Americans. Ministers issued public statements to the same effect. The policy fixed Haiti in the minds of Black Americans as a real alternative jurisdiction for decades, and was later broadened under Boyer.

Mina's difficulty was political rather than financial. His successes had been real, but he could not form an alliance with the other patriot commanders, none of whom would give up his own command, least of all to a Spaniard. He was left to continue with a small band while royalist forces concentrated to destroy him. A royalist general surprised him with a large trained cavalry force, took him prisoner, and he was executed a month afterwards. Lewis closes by noting how much of this network died with the decade. Petion's health declined after 1817 and he died on 29 March 1818, and Sutherland followed two years later, so neither of Bolivar's Haitian sponsors lived to see the independence they had financed. The article argues that historians pass lightly over Mina for one reason, that he failed.