Bolivar tells Bolivia's congress the Haitian republic is legitimate

Destin records that Boyer received particular praise from Simon Bolivar, who had come to Haiti for political asylum during the South American independence struggle, and who described the Haitian presidency and republic as legitimate in an address to the constituent congress of Bolivia. He places this alongside another approach from the same period, in which Mexican agents sought Boyer's aid for a scheme to undermine Spanish authority in Cuba, in order to secure Mexican independence and advance the wider movement, a plan that never materialised. Destin's point in assembling these is that a state no European power would recognise was nonetheless treated as a serious partner by the new republics of the hemisphere, and that this diplomatic role belongs in any account of what Boyer's presidency accomplished. Destin uses these approaches to argue that Boyer's reunified republic was treated as a functioning state abroad long before European recognition arrived.

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 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.

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.