A stroke at Limonade mass begins the collapse of the kingdom

Wilson dates the fall of the northern state to a single physical event. Attending mass for the Assumption in the small church at Limonade, the king suffered a massive stroke. His Scottish physician Duncan Stewart treated him on the spot and moved him to Sans-Souci, where he found total paralysis. Christophe survived as an invalid. Wilson's causal claim is direct: the visible incapacity of the ruler invited conspiracies that his methods had already prepared, since he governed by fear and by compulsory labour that Haitians who had just escaped slavery experienced as a return to it. Urged to abdicate in favour of the crown prince Victor, he refused. Nobles began defecting to Boyer, who had succeeded Petion in the south, and the army and the royal guard followed them. Within weeks the king had almost nobody left.

In 1822 Haitian troops occupied Santo Domingo, beginning the period Dominicans call the Haitian Domination, which lasted until 1844. The principle behind it went back to Toussaint Louverture, who had held that the freedom of the Haitian masses could not be secure while slavery survived on the other side of the island. The first official act of President Jean Pierre Boyer after taking over the government in Santo Domingo was to abolish slavery there. He followed it with a programme distributing smallholdings to freed people and peasants, and then went after the interests of the cattle ranchers and the Catholic Church. Hundreds of Dominicans left the country. Those twenty two years shaped how the Dominican elite would talk about Haiti for the next century and a half, and the writers who later built an anti Haitian national story had this occupation in mind whenever they described their neighbours as a threat.

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.

In 1818 the king of Dahomey, Adandozan, was deposed. The reason given was military failure, and the consequence of that failure was a shortage of captives for the sacrifices owed to the dead kings. His successor Gezo had seized the throne and needed to look unlike him. Gezo made military success the point of his reign. In 1823 he defeated Oyo, the Yoruba power in the interior that Dahomey had been paying tribute to since 1748, and the payments stopped. He enlarged the standing army, increased the scale of human sacrifice, and turned the armed women of the royal household, whom Europeans called the Amazons, from a bodyguard into a regular part of the field army. Nineteenth century British visitors found Dahomey more militarised than eighteenth century accounts had described. Gezo is a large part of the reason.