Boyer buys protection from invasion in an agreement with France

In a note supporting his claim that fear of invasion had subsided by the time Geffrard came to power, Destin records that Boyer entered into an agreement with France that secured French protection from invasion. The framing is unusual in its brevity and in what it emphasises, treating the arrangement as something Boyer obtained rather than something imposed on him, and using it to explain why a later president could turn from defence to building a state system. Destin's larger case is that Boyer's legacy lies in long-term management of a unified republic, and the agreement with France belongs to that argument. He also credits Boyer with recruiting black emigrants from the United States, paying their passage, working with an American emigration society and installing Methodist Episcopalian pastors. Destin says the aim of the emigration scheme was to settle specific areas with Protestant black families loyal to the new nation and to weaken the Roman church on the island. Where this account departs from the standard one: Destin presents the 1825 agreement as Boyer securing French protection, without treating it as the indemnity that burdened Haitian finances for generations.

The Cour Prevotale ended abruptly. Late in 1826 an order from the metropole suppressed it, and the reaction in Martinique was anger. The governor disbanded the court reluctantly while predicting that poisonings would climb again at once, and the slaveholders who had used it, and served on it, objected. Two years later, by a royal ordinance of September 1828, France applied the Napoleonic penal code of 1810 to its remaining Caribbean colonies, a code mentioning poison only as an instance of voluntary homicide and punishing divination and similar practices with a fine and a few days in jail. In 1831 the Martinique council drafted rules for applying the new law to enslaved people. The draft kept the old fear of societies formed to poison, and made the killing of an owner by any means a parricide, and for the first time in a century it treated sorcery and medicine as separate from poison.

In 1824 a man named Kinsley shipped a colony of enslaved people from Florida to the north coast of Hispaniola. His plan was to free them by a graduated process meant to run over several years. They saw that freedom was already within reach on the ground where they had landed and asserted it themselves shortly after arrival. They then settled on the banks of the Yasica, a small river crossing the well watered plain east of Puerto Plata, and became a quiet and hard working community. Along that stretch of coast they and their descendants were known for the rest of the century as the Kinsley boys. Fifty years later the land they held passed for the best cultivated and most productive on the island, the staple being sugar cane, to which that soil is well suited. Their case sat alongside a separate settlement of American emigrants of 1824 on the Samana peninsula.

Hormann tracks the closing and reopening of British argument about Haiti. Enthusiastic appraisals of the 1791 revolt by British abolitionists appear in 1791 and 1792 and then virtually stop after 1793, in abolitionist and radical writing alike, because members of parliament and the interests behind them recoiled from even discussing the end of the slave trade while it seemed likely to invite a repetition of events in the French colony. Thomas Clarkson, who had written on the revolt anonymously in 1792, mounted a very cautious defence of the Haitian Revolution again only in an essay of this year arguing for gradual emancipation in the British colonies. The chapter treats that thirty year silence as a political effect with datable causes, not as the boundary of what Europeans were capable of thinking.