A porcelain salesman sent to find markets finds slavery instead

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.

Jean-Pierre Boyer governed Haiti from 1818 to 1843 and reunified the whole island under his presidency in 1820. Contemporaries and later historians called his rule obscurantist, since it opposed the instruction of the mass of the population, and also military, autocratic and racially exclusive. Black officials were pushed out of administrative work and out of power. Schooling stayed with the light-skinned families of the elite. Under him the mainly mulatto fraction of the old free population consolidated itself as the ruling group and as the local relay of foreign commerce, taking hold of the port trade, specialising in ground rent and urban property, and leaving agriculture to blacks of every class. When the crisis came the sides failed to line up by colour. Against Boyer stood mulatto liberals speaking for landowners and merchants, black domaniers attacking mulatto hegemony as such, northern separatists, old followers of Christophe, and disappointed Boyerists inside the civil service.

Algeria was conquered by the Ottomans shortly after the Spanish reconquest of Granada in 1492, and Ottoman rule lasted until about 1830, when the country fell into French hands. The change was larger than a change of rulers. Under the French, Algeria entered the imperial domain of western capitalism, which the Ottoman sultanate had never belonged to, and it was governed by the same machinery of racial classification and economic extraction that had been assembled in the Americas. Settlers took the land. The people already there became a category to be administered. Haiti had been independent for twenty six years when this happened, and the French army that crossed to Algiers belonged to the state that was at that moment collecting the indemnity it had imposed on Haiti in 1825. The war that ended French rule in Algeria ran from 1954 to 1962.

On 24 June 1828 four French and Creole speaking Haitian women began their novitiate in Baltimore. Elizabeth Lange, born in Saint Domingue about 1784, had fled with her parents to Matanzas in Cuba before moving to Maryland, and she had been running a free school. Madeleine Balas taught in it. Rose Boegue was invited to join them. Almaide Duchemin, born in Baltimore to another refugee, was the youngest. Their constitution described a religious society of virgins and widows of colour whose purpose was the Christian education of coloured children. A refugee physician, Doctor Chatard, sold them their first house on Richmond Street for two thousand dollars, less than he had paid. Rome approved the congregation on 2 October 1831, which put it beyond the reach of a hostile bishop. Archbishop Samuel Eccleston later recommended that the sisters disband and take work as housekeepers for wealthy Maryland families.