A black physician lectures New York on Toussaint

James McCune Smith, a leading New York abolitionist who had taken his medical degree in Scotland because American schools would not have him, delivered a lecture on Toussaint Louverture at a benefit for the Colored Orphan Asylum. Excerpts ran in the Colored American that October and later in the North Star. Jackson places the lecture in a long line of black American writing that used the Haitian leader as evidence in an argument about capacity, running from the early press through William Wells Brown, who escaped slavery in 1834 and lectured and published on Saint-Domingue and its patriots before bringing out The Black Man in 1863. He notes that France had recognised Haitian independence in 1825 and Britain in 1833, while the United States withheld recognition until 1862, after the southern states had left the union.

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.

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.

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.