A senate of Boyer's own choosing ratifies the French indemnity

Boyer had sent an envoy to Brussels in 1823 and, when the French pressed for a new meeting, two representatives with full powers reached Paris on 1 May 1824 hoping to trade recognition for a commercial treaty. The talks covered the size of the indemnity owed to French planters dispossessed in the revolution, how far Louis the Eighteenth was prepared to go in recognising the state, and the terms of the commercial treaty France meant to impose. Haitian hopes collapsed again and what finally arrived was an ordinance and a price. The treaty was ratified on this day by a senate dominated by the president's favoured allies. Baur notes that a more liberal settlement came only in 1838, when Louis Philippe recognised the republic as free, sovereign and independent, cut the indemnity to sixty million francs and spread the payments to 1868. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus attacks explanations of Haitian development that rest on the Jefferson embargo, the indemnity and the American occupation, noting the embargo lasted four years and the indemnity was cleared in 1883, and blaming instead factors Dubois neglects such as Brazilian coffee expansion driving down world prices, population growth, currency devaluation and soil erosion.

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.

The Yoruba kingdom of Oyo defeated and subjected Dahomey in a war fought between 1726 and 1730, and collected tribute from Agaja and his successors for close to a hundred years. In 1823 Gezo beat Oyo and stopped paying. His victory became a set piece in the recital of his reign, told at length by the court historians. What sat around it was much thinner. The official history admitted that Agaja had paid tribute, mentioning it only in passing as background to another story. The Oyo invasion that devastated Dahomey under Agaja does not appear in the account of his reign at all, surfacing only inside Gezo's, as a measure of how much Gezo had undone. Major wars lost against Oyo under Tegbesu and under Agonglo were left out altogether. What the palace singers kept was a record of victories, and the defeats can be recovered only from European documents written at the time they happened.

Russwurm delivered his commencement address at Bowdoin College on the condition and prospects of Haiti, and the speech was carried in Maine and Boston papers within the week. The following year he and Samuel Cornish founded Freedom's Journal, which reached white as well as black readers in the northern and some southern states and in England, Canada and Haiti, and which they began partly to oppose the American Colonization Society. Its treatment of the revolution argued that few recorded events had produced more extraordinary effects, that the black character had burst upon the world in its original greatness, and that given liberty, independence and education the race would not be found wanting in minds capable of wielding the sword and swaying the rod of empire. David Walker's Appeal followed in 1828.