An earthquake and tsunami erase the Christophean capital

The tremor levelled Cap-Haitien, was felt as far away as Arkansas, and set off a lethal wave. Close to ten thousand people died and almost every structure was damaged beyond use. Daut links the disaster to the debt. The wealth accumulated under Christophe's kingdom disappeared at once into famine and general poverty, at a moment when the country was already being drained by the indemnity payments and by Boyer's taxes and paper currency. Demesvar Delorme, then eleven and living in the city, left the account she uses: a deep muffled roar as if from an abyss around dusk, then the cathedral bell tower swaying while the bells rang out of time, a horrible tolling. The ruin fed the movement that overthrew Boyer the following year, and it stands in her narrative as the moment the material inheritance of the revolution was lost.

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.

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.