France bills Haiti 150 million francs for existing

On 17 April 1825, with a French squadron off Port-au-Prince, Boyer accepted Charles X's ordinance: 150 million francs to compensate former colonists for their lost property, that property being human beings who had freed themselves. Recognition was the thing being sold and the price was the national budget many times over. Haiti borrowed from French banks to pay French claimants, which is the part people miss. The debt was reduced to 90 million later, and the servicing of it ran into the twentieth century, and the loans taken to service it are what put Haitian customs revenue in foreign hands and eventually put American marines on the wharf. This is the single most consequential financial transaction in the country's history, and for most of two centuries it was described in European sources as a settlement rather than as what any honest accountant would call it, which is a ransom.

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.

American newspapers tracked the emigration to Haiti vessel by vessel through the autumn of 1824. In September the Christian Secretary reported that the De Witt Clinton had left New York bound for Hayti carrying a full load, a hundred and twenty emigrants aboard. In October The Circular, published in Delaware, reported the Concordia out of New York with about a hundred and sixty colored emigrants, male and female. In November the Genius of Universal Emancipation, published in Baltimore, reported the ship Armata leaving that port with two hundred and eighty. Organisations existed in several cities to arrange the passages, among them the Haytien Emigration Society, based in Baltimore, and a New York body called the Society for African Colonization, and they printed reports of what was called the removal of the colored population. The papers carried letters from emigrants who were pleased and from emigrants who were ruined, according to which side of the argument the paper took.

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.