Boyer declares Haiti one country at Gonaives

With Christophe's kingdom disintegrating, Boyer proclaimed the country united at Gonaives and rode into Cap-Haitien, the northern capital, on the twenty sixth. Baur presents this as the first simple step toward unity and the act that gave prestige to a tottering state, while noting the contrast between the two halves of the island. The kingdom had been built and drilled while the Republic still lay in the ruins left by the revolutionary wars. Unification also brought the treasury of the north, which for a short time made the state look wealthy, and it brought conspiracies. Eleven men were shot and fifty sentenced over one assassination plot, and in 1822 a former ally revolted and spread the rumour that the president was selling Haiti back to the French. Baur calls it the first simple step toward a single national state.

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.

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.