The 1843 revolution splits the elite and opens the colour question

Discontent inside the elite, led by Herard Dumesle, the Lespinasse brothers, Emile Nau and others, exploded in 1843 with a revolution that produced a new mulatto-dominated regime. Nicholls identifies the mechanism precisely. The split in the ranks of the ruling class, combined with the frustration and anxiety of the black masses, produced a series of revolts in the South and brought the government down. The colour factor, which had played an important but subordinate role since colonial days, came into the open and became the arbiter of events. Feelings ran so high that the government of Jean-Louis Pierrot found it necessary in 1845 to enact what amounts to a race relations law, providing that anyone indulging in idle talk about colour likely to spread dissension among Haitians would be arrested, imprisoned and delivered to the courts.

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.

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.

The crisis that ended Boyer's rule opened into peasant insurrection. Jean-Jacques Acaau and Jeannot Moline led risings from 1843 to 1848 known as the war of the Piquets. Their demands were land, better prices for produce and a black man in the presidency. The scale of the fighting pushed the governing groups into alliance against the peasantry. The device they used has a name in Haitian political language, the politique de doublure, the understudy policy. Black men drawn from the ruling strata were placed in the presidency while the mulatto oligarchy governed from behind, smothering the political claims of the men it had installed along with the movements in the countryside. Men handled this way were called kongo, a word still used in Haiti for a black man who has sold himself and collaborates without pride. Acaau is credited with the saying that a rich black is a mulatto and a poor mulatto is a black.