Rome sends a bishop from South Carolina and gets nothing

Gregory the Sixteenth wrote to Boyer announcing that he was sending John England, bishop of Charleston, to treat on church affairs, to deliberate on the choice of pastors, to form a national clergy, to establish ecclesiastical discipline and to provide for the spiritual needs of the people. The pope wanted to appoint a vicar apostolic for Haiti. Nothing came of the attempted reconciliation and the bishop departed in 1836. Baur reads the failure through the character of the regime rather than of the church, arguing that under Boyer the church had become a political instrument, and noting that the same president had persecuted the Wesleyan Methodist ministers who arrived in 1811. Formal relations with Rome would wait for the concordat of a later administration. Baur notes that the episode left the Haitian church without a settled hierarchy for another quarter of a century.

Garcia V died in 1830 and a Capuchin went up to Sao Salvador one last time to conduct the funeral. In the disorder that followed he could not crown a successor. He came back to Loanda with a Kongolese lay brother and found his last European colleague dead. The kingdom and the mission were ending together. Garcia's priest son left the Kongo for work in Angola, where there was no bishop between 1826 and 1852 and fewer than twenty priests. Italian diocesan clergy from Milan and a group of Swiss Benedictines both offered to go and revive the church there, and both offers were killed by Capuchin and Portuguese obstruction. In 1834 an anticlerical government in Lisbon ordered every convent closed and the Capuchin property was sold. Bernardo da Burgio sailed for Palermo in May 1835 with the mission archives and one companion, the Kongolese brother Bernardo of Sao Salvador.

Marie Laveau was born in New Orleans, probably in 1801, a free woman of colour and a Catholic. In 1819 she married Jacques Paris, a free man of colour born in Saint Domingue, at St Louis Cathedral. The marriage lasted only a few years, and through it she most likely formed her understanding of what Vodou could do as political resistance. She attended mass daily at the same cathedral, whose congregation was largely made up of free women of colour and was among the most integrated places in the world at the time. She reigned as Vodou queen of the city from 1850 to 1869, running a spiritual house on the Haitian model from St Ann Street. She nursed people through yellow fever epidemics, worked with prisoners under sentence of death, distributed gris gris, and held ceremonies at Lake Pontchartrain that only initiates attended. Her reach crossed lines of race, class, colour and religion that almost nobody else crossed.

Britain abolished slavery throughout its colonies in 1834 and France did the same in 1848. The effects crossed to the United States at once, because both sides of the American argument found what they were looking for in the same islands. Abolitionists were emboldened by the absence of avenging violence after emancipation, which answered the standing prediction that freed people would murder their former owners. Defenders of slavery pointed to the economic failure of the plantations under a system of non slave labour, which answered the standing claim that free labour would be more productive. Each camp had a real fact and used it. For thirty years the British and French Caribbean served the United States as the working experiment its own debate lacked, which is one reason the region stayed present in American politics through the decades before the Civil War.