Bolivar leaves Haiti off the guest list at Panama

Bolivar convened a congress at Panama to settle the shape of the new American republics, with Mexico among those attending. Haiti, by then reunified under Boyer, was not invited. Daut works from the Haitian writer Marion, who observed acidly that the man who had received effective hospitality in Haiti had forgotten it, and who located the reason in race, asking whether the exclusion was because Haitian parents had recently been enslaved. The point runs through her chapter on anti-colonialism. Haiti had supplied the material means of an independence movement and had made abolition the condition of its help, yet the new states organised their common future in a room it was barred from. The pattern of using Haitian assistance and then denying Haitian standing recurs, and Marion noted the United States behaved no differently.

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.

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.

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.