Petion dies and hands his successor a presidency for life

Alexandre Petion died of disease and worry after twelve years in office. Baur argues that the years from 1806 to 1818 set the precedents and made the errors that his political heir could study as examples of what not to do. The constitutional machinery mattered more than the man. The text of 1806, amended in 1816, provided for a presidency held for life and for the chief executive to name his own successor subject to legislative ratification, and since Boyer had long been the obvious candidate he was duly elected and in turn proclaimed his own successor. The immediate threats were Christophe in the north and the armed bands of the Grand'Anse, who had refused to obey the Republic since 1807 and against whom Boyer sent a powerful expedition in January 1819 that scattered them.

Within fifteen years of Waterloo the British islands produced three risings that rank among the biggest anywhere in the Americas: Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831. Geggus points out that the timing of each tracked a development in the antislavery movement in Britain, and that each set of rebels called for the enforcement of a freedom law they wrongly took to have passed at home and to be hidden by officials on the spot. He counts over twenty such episodes between 1789 and the early 1830s where the enslaved insisted that a law had already freed them, or had cut their week down to three days of work. He traces the syndrome back to an aborted rising on Martinique in August 1789 and connects it to reform efforts in England, France and Spain that slaveholders publicly resisted.

In 1818 two French medical writers, Fournier and Begim, published an attack on Felix Pascalis of New York. They called him a man who had never really been a doctor at all. Then they went further and named his connection in Saint-Domingue with the insurgent leader they called the pious Romain and with the camp at Trou Coffy, accusing him of presiding over the killing of white civilians and the mutilation of their bodies. Pascalis demanded two thousand dollars in damages. He also wrote to Jean Deveze in Paris, who had run the fever hospital at Bush Hill in Philadelphia in 1793, and obtained from him a signed declaration in February 1820 that his conduct during the Trou Coffy affair had deserved glory. To make his case he set down in 1821 a long memoir of what he had seen, the Anecdote historique. That document, written to save a medical reputation in Manhattan, is one of the fullest eyewitness accounts of any 1791 insurgency in the colony.

Destin argues that Christophe modelled the north on a monarchy for a reason that has nothing to do with vanity. Britain was doing more to abolish slavery than imperial France, which had earlier offered emancipation as a bargaining chip, or than the United States and Spain, which lagged as slaveholding powers. If a kingdom could do more against slavery than a republic, Haitians might be better placed inside one. The move both honoured black independence and provoked slaveholding powers, and Christophe sent letters asking foreign leaders to address him by his title, which caused outrage. He contracted German builders for the mountain fortress, corresponded with British abolitionists about public instruction, and recruited teachers. Destin says the fortress and the palace, rather than the crown, are what now stand for Haitian nationality.