A hundred forest laws and every one of them a punishment

Clearing for coffee and sugar cane began stripping the hills of Saint Domingue in the colonial period, and the loss of soil continued after independence. From 1826 the Haitian government legislated more than a hundred laws and policies meant to protect the forests and the soil. Almost every one took the form of a tax, a prohibition, a penalty or a police operation. None of them gave a farmer a reason to plant. From the early 1950s the government and foreign aid agencies turned instead to projects: reforestation, soil conservation, watershed management. Most of these treated large blocks of adjoining land and ravines at once, paid farmers in cash or food to take part, disregarded what farmers already knew about holding soil in place, and passed over the tangle of Haitian land tenure. They produced neither restored land nor better harvests. A different method appeared in the early 1980s, working plot by plot on the premise that a farmer who keeps his soil grows more and needs no payment to do it.

Holman Bentley finished the Kikongo New Testament in 1893. Four centuries had passed since the king of the Kongo was first baptised, and in all that time no gospel had been put into the language, though a catechism had. Bentley worked closely with a young man called Nlemvo, whom the mission regarded as its first convert and who, Bentley wrote, helped him with all his literary work. Nlemvo's uncle, the man who had brought him to the mission as a boy, kept a small brass crucifix he prayed before and had it fixed to the wall by his bed when he was dying. He was known by a Kikongo word meaning believer, a recognised category of person who required crosses and holy water at a funeral. Twice at Sao Salvador, Bentley recalled, someone stood up after the sermon to tell the congregation to listen, because this was what their old relatives had told them.

On 29 September 1981 Ronald Reagan ordered the Coast Guard to patrol the water between Haiti and Florida and to stop boats carrying people toward the United States. Crews were to interview passengers at sea, return anyone judged ineligible and bring the rest ashore to make an asylum claim. Nobody interviewed on a cutter had access to a lawyer. In the first ten years of the programme, up to the coup that removed Jean Bertrand Aristide in September 1991, more than twenty four thousand Haitians were interviewed at sea and twenty eight were brought to the United States to pursue a claim. After the coup the numbers overwhelmed the cutters, and the administration built a tent city at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, where from November 1991 people picked up at sea were sent for screening. It filled with Haitians and Cubans and was hard to empty.

The son of a porcelain manufacturer travelled on business and saw slavery at first hand. On returning to France he published letters in the Revue de Paris, the fourth of them on black people, describing the condition of the enslaved and the brutality of the system, and saying the scene would never leave his memory. His initial position was gradualist. He held that slavery had so debased its victims materially and spiritually that immediate emancipation would be dangerous for society and for the freed, and he advocated progressive abolition and a process of moral preparation. The article stresses that even at this stage he did not treat degradation as a disqualification from rights. That early trip anchors a trajectory in which each stage of Schoelcher's abolitionism is fixed by direct observation rather than by doctrine.