A freedom law arrives with a treadmill and a vagrancy act

The statute that ended apprenticeship in Dominica carried its purpose in its own title. It terminated the apprenticeship of praedial labourers on 1 August 1838, encouraged settlement upon plantations, and prevented persons from squatting or establishing themselves on land to which they had no title. It sat inside a run of laws passed between 1836 and 1838. One subjected offenders to hard labour on the treadmill. One replaced a company of rangers with a rural police force. One let justices of the peace dispossess by summary process anyone occupying land without title. One punished idle and disorderly persons, rogues, vagabonds and vagrants, and defined a rogue to include anyone carrying a picklock, a key, a crowbar or a cutlass with intent, giving any person whatsoever the power to seize them. Fewer than fifty men held effective political power on the island while this was being written. Emancipation and the law of vagrancy arrived in the same parcel.

Jean-Pierre Boyer governed Haiti from 1818 to 1843. He is remembered for two pieces of legislation. The rural code of 1826 tied the Haitian peasant to a marginal existence and went on doing so long after his fall. The penal code of 1835 placed Vodou under the heading of superstitions and made its practice illegal, punishable by fine and imprisonment. One article specifically exacted fines and prison from anyone who made zombies or cast spells, which meant the state had written a belief about the dead into its criminal law and then undertaken to prosecute people under it. Practitioners responded the way people respond to that: they went further into secrecy, and priests surrounded their worship with mystery and with a reputation for power. Both effects outlasted Boyer by more than a century, and the sensational literature about Haiti drew much of its raw material from the court cases the article produced.

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.

Perry shows the analogy between aboriginal and African enslavement acquiring legal force. Both Alexandre Pétion's 1816 constitution and the post-Boyer constitution of 1843 allowed the immigration and naturalisation of individuals of either African or Indian descent. In this vision, she argues, Afro-diasporic Haitians and the descendants of the Taino could be indigenous at the same time, because the label above all designates a relation to Europeans as usurpers, a position that ought normatively to produce anticolonial alliance. She sets this beside Dessalines's address to the people after a failed expedition against French troops in the Spanish half of Hispaniola, in which he presumed that the indigènes espagnols, descendants of the Indians destroyed by the first usurpers of the island, would seize the chance to sacrifice to the spirits of their ancestors. That expectation was disappointed.