Washington writes itself a right to intervene, then finds a pretext

Dupuy denies any direct causal link between Haitian political disorder and the American landing. From the Monroe Doctrine onward, and with particular energy from the 1850s, the United States built the military capacity to displace European powers from Central America, the Caribbean and Latin America, and it invaded across the region from Mexico to Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, with Puerto Rico and the Philippines added at the end of the war with Spain. Haiti fits that pattern and would have been invaded whether or not its politics were unstable. The Roosevelt Corollary supplied the operative doctrine, asserting a regional police power to correct chronic wrongdoing. Renda adds the financial half of the mechanism, dollar diplomacy, in which loans came with American advisers attached, and names the National City Bank of New York as a decisive author of the 1915 plans and a source of pressure on Wilson.

On 1 August 1838 the abolition of slavery took full effect on the British island of Dominica and roughly fourteen thousand people stopped being property. An interim period of apprenticeship had run from 1834 and was supposed to ease owners and slaves into the new arrangement. It settled nothing. Dominica registered one of the lowest ratios of enslaved people to land anywhere in the British Caribbean, and for ecological and historical reasons the plantation had never dominated the island the way it dominated the older sugar colonies. Planters and officials could see what abundant land would mean, and from 1834 they had already brought in severe measures to keep apprentices on the estates. Once apprenticeship ended they used every method available to stop cultivators establishing holdings of their own. Most of the freed people could not read, and they spoke a French based creole rather than English, a survival from the period before Britain took the island in 1763. The fight over land and labour ran on for a century.

On 4 November 1892 the women soldiers of Dahomey fought the French army at the gates of Cana. It was their last battle. The kingdom fell, and the French abolished the Dahomean monarchy in 1900. The date of the ending is exact, which is unusual, and the date of the beginning is not. Claims in the literature run from the reign of Wegbaja, who ruled somewhere between about 1640 and the early 1680s, to that of Glele, who ruled from 1858 to 1889. Most writers have credited either Agaja, king in the 1720s and 1730s, or Gezo, king from 1818 to 1858. Amelie Degbelo, who interviewed scores of Dahomeans for a thesis, found that ninety nine of every hundred named Gezo. He certainly enlarged the corps, hardened its training and armed it better. The women were called amazons by Europeans, and they were the standing infantry of a West African state.

On 18 May 1896 the United States Supreme Court decided Plessy against Ferguson and made segregation lawful for the next fifty eight years. The case had been organised by the Comite des Citoyens of New Orleans, a body drawn mostly from families descended from Saint Domingue, whose president that year had himself been born in Haiti. Louisiana had passed a Separate Car Act in 1890 to divide passengers on the railways. Rodolphe Desdunes and his son Daniel first tested it on a journey between states and won. The committee then sent Homere Plessy to test it on a journey inside Louisiana, and that case went up to the Supreme Court and was lost. The date chosen for the announcement was 18 May, which is Haitian flag day.