Twenty two presidents, eleven of them lasting under a year

Between the removal of Jean-Pierre Boyer in 1843 and the American landing of 1915, Haiti had twenty two presidents. Eleven of them held office for less than a year. Exactly one managed to retire peacefully. Four died of causes described as natural while still in office. The remainder were deposed with varying degrees of violence. The same seventy two years saw more than a hundred coups, attempted coups and uprisings. The mechanism was structural. Small cliques fought each other for control of the treasury, and because they were usually too small to hold off the next contender they aimed at quick gains rather than long tenure, which produced the next clique with the same aim. The pattern was predictable: a would be president hired a mercenary army, marched on the capital, and on success went straight for whatever the vaults held. Rulers who lasted did so by investing heavily in police and networks of informers.

On 4 November 1892 the women soldiers of Dahomey fought the French army at the gates of Cana. It was their last battle. The kingdom fell, and the French abolished the Dahomean monarchy in 1900. The date of the ending is exact, which is unusual, and the date of the beginning is not. Claims in the literature run from the reign of Wegbaja, who ruled somewhere between about 1640 and the early 1680s, to that of Glele, who ruled from 1858 to 1889. Most writers have credited either Agaja, king in the 1720s and 1730s, or Gezo, king from 1818 to 1858. Amelie Degbelo, who interviewed scores of Dahomeans for a thesis, found that ninety nine of every hundred named Gezo. He certainly enlarged the corps, hardened its training and armed it better. The women were called amazons by Europeans, and they were the standing infantry of a West African state.

On 18 May 1896 the United States Supreme Court decided Plessy against Ferguson and made segregation lawful for the next fifty eight years. The case had been organised by the Comite des Citoyens of New Orleans, a body drawn mostly from families descended from Saint Domingue, whose president that year had himself been born in Haiti. Louisiana had passed a Separate Car Act in 1890 to divide passengers on the railways. Rodolphe Desdunes and his son Daniel first tested it on a journey between states and won. The committee then sent Homere Plessy to test it on a journey inside Louisiana, and that case went up to the Supreme Court and was lost. The date chosen for the announcement was 18 May, which is Haitian flag day.

March 1849 opened Soulouque's campaign to recover the eastern part of the island. The Haitians advanced on Azua while dissension divided Santo Domingo, but reports of the massacres and of imminent doom rallied the Dominicans, who struck back and overwhelmed the advance guard. Soulouque himself barely escaped and retreated westward. Baur gives the mechanism of the claim as constitutional and fiscal rather than merely vengeful: Haitians had insisted since independence that the state embraced the whole island, since Spain had ceded the east to France in 1795, and successive constitutions declared the island indivisible, while the customs revenue of the eastern ports was presented as necessary to service the debt to France. Pedro Santana's privateers under the French adventurer Fagalde then raided the Haitian coast as far as Dame Marie.