Ten risings in four years leave the state too broken to face outsiders

MacLeod counts at least ten attempted revolts out of the north, south and west in the four years before Soulouque took office, and treats that count as the structural fact behind everything the new president then did. A state torn by region and faction could not present one position to Britain, France or the United States, and foreign observers read the weakness accurately. The article links this to a specific fear rather than a general one. Soulouque believed the three great powers had designs on Haitian territory, and in the case of the United States, which had still not recognized Haiti after more than forty years, the fear was sharpened by the existence of the slaveholding South and by the expansionist temper of the period. The breakaway of the Dominican Republic after Boyer fell left, in his reading, an exposed flank that a European or American power could occupy.

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.

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.

On Saturday 7 May 1842 the Septentrional fault in northern Hispaniola moved. Witnesses said the ground worked for several minutes and came in two distinct shocks, the second doing most of the harm. In Port-au-Prince people ran out of the downtown buildings into the streets, and the coat of arms above the Senate entrance fell and shattered, which onlookers read as a sign that the government would come down too. Tremors went on through the weekend, and a heavy one broke up mass on Sunday 8 May. Reports reached the capital from Puerto Plata, Gonaives and Saint-Marc, and from Falmouth in western Jamaica. A mountain near Saint-Marc was said to have split in two. James Hartwell, a British missionary in Port-au-Prince, wrote to England wondering why the capital had been spared. At Gonaives the government house, the arsenal, the treasury and the prison collapsed, sixty prisoners escaped, and a fire the next evening burned much of the rest.