A special court tries 368 people for poisoning in six years

The Cour Prevotale sat in Martinique from 1822 to 1827 and tried nobody except enslaved people and free people of colour, and nothing except poisoning. Governor Donzelot had called for extraordinary measures to satisfy justice and produce a beneficial terror, citing the tribunal of Villaret-Joyeuse as precedent. Relaxing the rules of evidence produced the largest poison crisis anywhere in this history, in a colony then at peace. Across some thirty cases, most of them omnibus trials covering many defendants from a single district, the court tried 368 people, convicted 289 and executed 104. Its composition marks a turning point. Medical practitioners were only 7 per cent of the accused, references to spells appear in three trials, and mineral poisons figure in 40 per cent of the cases. Arsenic worried Donzelot enough that he restricted its sale. The suspected poisoner was now the trusted house servant.

Felix Darfour was born in western Sudan, taken to France by an officer of the Egyptian expedition, educated and married there, and settled in Haiti in 1818, where the constitution granted nationality to any African who came to live in the country. He founded a newspaper, L'Eclaireur, later renamed L'Avertisseur. On 30 August 1822 a message from him was read to the Chamber of Representatives. It said that Jean-Pierre Boyer favoured foreigners with a monopoly of commerce, that Haitian fortunes could not rise under him, and that the president gave advantages only to men of colour while refusing blacks instruction in order to prove them naturally unfit to govern. Boyer ordered him tried by a military commission on the morning of 31 August. He was sentenced the same day and shot on 2 September in front of the people and the army. Darfour was a civilian tried by soldiers, and the petition itself never entered the case file.

Boyd opens his account of the 1860s scheme with its precedent. In 1824 President Boyer sent an agent to New York state to enlist six thousand skilled farmers and artisans from among the free black population, offering free passage, generous land grants and citizenship in a country where race prejudice and oppression did not operate. The American Colonization Society refused to help, arguing that distinctions of class and colour were drawn just as sharply in Haiti as anywhere, with lighter and darker Haitians despising each other and both resenting arrivals from the United States. The recruitment worked anyway. Boyd reports a claim that between ten and twelve thousand black Americans made their way to Haiti during that decade. He notes the standing appeal of the destination, that a country independent since 1804 in a sea of colonies was itself a practical refutation of assertions of black incapacity.

Yingling's book is built to explain a moment usually described as a Haitian occupation. In February 1822 Jean-Pierre Boyer unified Hispaniola, and he did so to acclaim from many of his new fellow citizens across classes and regions. Communities had asked for it: the people of Neiba requested that Haiti accept them among its children, and those of Samana said Boyer would embrace them like a tender father, exchanging a distant white king for a present leader of colour. San Juan de la Maguana's residents said the whole island had only one family. Enslaved and oppressed Dominicans, whose families had been broken up systematically, acquired rights in the first universally emancipated state in the Americas. Haitian officials called all Dominicans siblings of soil, people born of similarly damaged colonial pasts. Yingling adds that the harmony proved brief. Where this account departs from the standard one: Presents the 1822 unification as a popularly requested and broadly welcomed act of anti-imperial kinship rather than a Haitian conquest of Dominican territory.