Ardouin draws the line of his democracy at Acaau's demand for land

Ardouin praised Petion's policy of distributing and selling land as proof of a democratic spirit, and as a wise act that prevented the growth of a body of army officers resentful of the holdings of the anciens libres. He criticised the senate for opposing the measure and wanting to keep the large plantations intact. Nicholls then sets the limit. Ardouin condemned in the harshest terms the demands Acaau put forward in 1844, calling them the communist doctrine of the division of property, and defended both the constitutional exclusion of white landowners as an urgent political necessity and Petion's offer of compensation to dispossessed French planters on the principle that respect for property underpins the entire social order. The mechanism is a democracy defined precisely wide enough to include the class that was writing the history.

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.

Suzanne Simon Baptiste was described by a contemporary as a very large black woman of about forty with the modesty of a girl of twenty, plain in her tastes, who grew coffee with her own hands while her husband governed the colony. Toussaint said he had chosen her himself against the wishes of his owners, who wanted to marry him to younger women, and that before the revolution he had not left her for an hour. On 7 April 1803 her husband died in his cell at the Fort de Joux and she lost any hope of seeing him again. She lived on in France, poor, under a sky that was not hers, for another forty three years, and died on 19 May 1846 at the age of sixty seven. She had held no public office and made no speeches, and her name opens the line of women set beside the men who made the country.

In March 1841 Gregory XVI told Bishop Rosati, sent to Haiti on a mission that nearly worked, that he could not die easy without seeing this poor abandoned country become Christian again. He died in 1846 without it. The obstruction was not theological. Haiti had a functioning religious life and did not need Rome's permission to have one. The blockage was that recognizing Haiti ecclesiastically meant recognizing Haiti, and the Vatican was not going to move ahead of the Catholic monarchies. The Concordat finally signed in 1860 mattered for a reason that is usually skipped: it handed the entire education system to French religious orders. So the schooling of the Haitian elite for the next century was designed abroad, taught in French, and structurally hostile to the language and religion of the majority. The 1860 signature is why the 1980 language debate was still being fought.