Nineteen years of negotiating with Rome

In March 1841 Gregory XVI told Bishop Rosati, sent to Haiti on a mission that nearly worked, that he could not die easy without seeing this poor abandoned country become Christian again. He died in 1846 without it. The obstruction was not theological. Haiti had a functioning religious life and did not need Rome's permission to have one. The blockage was that recognizing Haiti ecclesiastically meant recognizing Haiti, and the Vatican was not going to move ahead of the Catholic monarchies. The Concordat finally signed in 1860 mattered for a reason that is usually skipped: it handed the entire education system to French religious orders. So the schooling of the Haitian elite for the next century was designed abroad, taught in French, and structurally hostile to the language and religion of the majority. The 1860 signature is why the 1980 language debate was still being fought.

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.

Enumerators began taking a new census of Dominica in the first days of June 1844. Field workers freed six years earlier believed that the writing down of names was preparation for putting them back into slavery. About fifteen hundred people in the countryside walked off, protested and threatened planters, officials and the enumerators themselves. Ten or twelve people were hurt and none of them seriously. The reaction was the event. Four protesters were killed, four were wounded and some three hundred cultivators were jailed. Ninety four were tried and ninety convicted, six of them sentenced to death. The trials showed the rising elite of free coloured men something it had not expected. Witnesses reported that the labourers drew little distinction between white owners and coloured ones, and one man was quoted saying that people of colour would weed the canes and the country would become like Saint-Domingue. The coloured members of the assembly, the grand jury and the bench sided with the prosecutions.

In 1848 the budget of the Haitian army stood at 3,232,225 francs, which came to sixty five per cent of everything the national government spent. Faustin Soulouque was in his second year as president and would crown himself emperor the following year. The figure is worth setting beside what the state did not do. It ran almost no schools outside the towns, maintained few roads, and drew most of its revenue from a tax on coffee grown by farmers it otherwise left alone. No European power was preparing to land. France had recognised Haitian independence in 1825 and the threat that justified this spending had passed a generation earlier. The army existed at that size because control of it was the route to the presidency, and every president had to pay for the loyalty that had put him there and could remove him. Two thirds of public money went to the one institution that decided who governed.