Peasant risings recruit army officers rather than fight them

Gerlus uses two rural movements to show that the line between peasantry and army was porous in a way that shaped Haitian politics. The Piquet movement began in the southern peninsula under Jean-Jacques Acaau, whom he describes as a peasant who had apparently become a soldier. The Caco movement started in the north a generation later and looked to him like an alliance between poor and landless peasants and senior army officers. Between those dates Faustin Soulouque, a peasant who had climbed to the top of the army, ruled from 1847 to 1859 first as president and then as emperor. Gerlus's point is structural. Because holding state power was the reliable route to land and income, insurgency and officeholding were parts of one system, and rural grievance was repeatedly harnessed to the ambitions of men who already held commissions.

Haiti occupied the eastern side of Hispaniola from 1822 to 1844, and Dominican writing came to call those twenty two years the black years. The Dominican Republic keeps 27 February as its independence day, and what the date marks is separation from Haiti. Spain governed the same territory for three centuries and the end of that rule carries no comparable holiday, which is the point: the celebration expresses a wish to claim a European legacy and to be free of an African past. Before the French Revolution the French held western third of the island had a much larger black population than the Spanish held east, and the Spanish speaking inhabitants of Santo Domingo had long feared a more numerous and militarily stronger French speaking black society on their border. Haiti invaded three times. In the early 1900s Haitian labourers, many of them undocumented, crossed the other way to cut cane and to live in the bateyes, and scholars date the sharpest growth of anti Haitian feeling to that migration.

Redpath founded The Pine and Palm in Boston on 18 May 1861 as the organ of the movement, dedicated to raising black Americans to full social, political and national equality with whites. Its columns demanded immediate federal abolition, a constitutional convention with or without southern consent, union with the British provinces to the north, and two tropical confederacies settled by white and black Americans, one in the West Indies and one in Central America. Redpath told a Manchester cotton buyer that having failed to break the slave power with lead, practical abolitionists were now willing to try cotton, since free labour in Haiti could undercut slave grown crops. Boyd notes that many readers took Redpath for a black man. The paper ran until 24 July 1862, abusing the cabinet and the Republican party throughout, and endorsing a third party ticket.

Through the 1850s Haiti made repeated attempts to bring the eastern part of Hispaniola under its control. The defeat of its forces at the battle of Sabana Larga in 1856 ended those attempts. Haitian leaders had held since independence that the island had to be indivisible, on the reasoning that a slaveholding power installed in the east would eventually come west. The fear was not abstract. A ring of slaveholding territories ran from the southern United States through Cuba and Puerto Rico, and Haiti was treated by all of them as an anomaly that ought not to exist. What made the 1850s worse was that Haitian leaders could see the leading politicians of the young Dominican Republic looking for a foreign protector. After Sabana Larga the Haitian aim of political union was abandoned, and the Dominican search for annexation to a larger state went on.