The legislature votes the widow Dessalines a hundred gourdes a month

Everything Claire Heureuse lived on was taken from her officially as soon as Dessalines was killed. She had saved almost nothing, having spent what she had on relieving distress and on educating the group of girls she had taken charge of, and she fell first into difficulty and then into real poverty. She bore it for thirty seven years. On 17 May 1843 General Charles Herard the elder, a member of the provisional government that replaced Boyer, passed through Saint-Marc, was shaken by the state he found her in, relieved her out of his own pocket and asked his colleagues for a life pension for the wife of the founder of independence. On 21 August of the same year the legislature voted her a modest pension of one hundred gourdes a month. She drew it until 1856. The republic had existed for thirty nine years before it thought of paying her anything.

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.

In 1841 Charles Baudelaire, newly twenty, was put aboard a ship for Calcutta by his stepfather. He got as far as Mauritius and Bourbon, then part of France's plantation empire, and the voyage fed poems that later appeared in Les Fleurs du Mal. Back in Paris he began a relationship with an actress known as Jeanne Duval, widely reported to be of Haitian descent, whom he called his Black Venus. It ran more than twenty years. She is the subject of many of his own drawings and of a canvas by Edouard Manet, and visitors described finding him reading unpublished work aloud to her. Emmanuel Richon showed in 1998 that scholars had never established her origins and had repeated without evidence that she infected the poet with syphilis, when the transmission more likely went the other way. Slavery was abolished in Bourbon and the other French possessions less than seven years after his visit, while Paris argued about the equality of the races.

In the first volume of his Histoire d'Haïti, Thomas Madiou argues for the disappearance of the Taino on grounds of absorption rather than complete extermination: until the middle of the eighteenth century certain families kept unmixed descent and used the title of cacique, but by his own day no Haitian belonged directly to that race. Perry notes that Madiou's narration collapses racial purity into the survival of social structures, leaving the reader to assume Taino social practice ended with intermarriage, which was convenient for the new state since he had described Taino families as exercising a limited legal autonomy. His contemporary Émile Nau made a stronger case for continuity, stressing partial descent and the survival of Taino words and songs, but still denied that nineteenth-century Haitians were direct heirs. Where this account departs from the standard one: Perry argues that if one drops the requirement that aboriginal people be racially pure to count as such, the habitual claim that the Taino were eliminated on Hispaniola becomes an overstatement, and she notes that Moreau de Saint-Méry's own account, which records people with special legal status, unduly minimises their presence.