Joute Lachenais dines at the right hand of the French envoy

Marie Madeleine Joute was born at Arcahaie in 1778, daughter of Marie-Therese Fabre and the colonist de Lachenais. After the death of her first companion she attached herself to Alexandre Petion, who had decided never to marry, and her influence over him grew year by year. She picked out the young Jean-Pierre Boyer from the men around the ailing president and set about making him the successor. From 1807 Boyer rose through every rank without a single action to justify it, and the veterans who might have claimed the succession, Bonnet, Delva, Lys and others, were pushed aside. He was elected president for life before Petion was buried. In 1825, when Haiti resumed official relations with France and received the baron de Mackau on behalf of Charles the Tenth, Boyer and Joute Lachenais were entertained aboard the frigate La Circee, where she sat in diamonds at the plenipotentiary's right hand.

In 1822 Haitian troops occupied Santo Domingo, beginning the period Dominicans call the Haitian Domination, which lasted until 1844. The principle behind it went back to Toussaint Louverture, who had held that the freedom of the Haitian masses could not be secure while slavery survived on the other side of the island. The first official act of President Jean Pierre Boyer after taking over the government in Santo Domingo was to abolish slavery there. He followed it with a programme distributing smallholdings to freed people and peasants, and then went after the interests of the cattle ranchers and the Catholic Church. Hundreds of Dominicans left the country. Those twenty two years shaped how the Dominican elite would talk about Haiti for the next century and a half, and the writers who later built an anti Haitian national story had this occupation in mind whenever they described their neighbours as a threat.

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 most violent of the rural codes written by the Haitian state was the one promulgated by President Jean Pierre Boyer in 1826. It bound peasants who owned nothing, or owned a fragment of land, to three years of compulsory labour on a large estate. It forbade them to move freely outside their rural section. It placed their work under the supervision of the army. The estates in question had belonged to French colonists who were killed or fled, and after independence they were divided among the black and mulatto generals and the senior officials of the new state. A succession of Haitian governments issued codes of this kind and they resembled one another closely, because they all answered the same problem: how to make people who had just stopped being slaves produce export crops on somebody else's land.