A new president governs by keeping the dead man's cabinet

In his opening months Soulouque did what his sponsors wanted. He announced that he would carry on the policies of Riche, kept every member of the inherited cabinet, followed their advice closely, and stayed inside the terms of the constitution. MacLeod reads this as a deliberate holding position rather than passivity, since the president had no political base of his own and no experience of civil government. By late in the year the arrangement had begun to break down, and the mechanism of the breakdown was prestige. The president was there to be managed, everyone knew it, and the ridicule reaching him from educated Port-au-Prince, from resident foreigners and from the foreign press made the arrangement intolerable to a man sensitive about his servile past. A minor dispute over the budget, his first attempt at initiative, produced immediate opposition and the resignation of two elite ministers.

Until the Second Republic he had remained a technical expert, oddly isolated from both the radical republican and the abolitionist movements, writing for journals including La Reforme. The revolution brought the republicans to power and gave him the chance to apply what he had argued since 1840, that emancipation must be immediate and unqualified, that racial equality follows from it, and that emancipation without citizenship leaves freedom without substance. As undersecretary of state for the colonies he headed the commission that abolished slavery in the French colonies. He was then elected by the freed populations of Martinique and Guadeloupe to represent them. He returned to France after the fall of the Empire in August 1870, was elected again by Martinique in 1871, and spent the rest of his life as the recognised spokesman for antislavery and for the memory of Toussaint Louverture, dying in 1893.

Gaffield lists the sequence in which the powers eventually granted official diplomatic recognition: France in 1825, the British empire, the Netherlands and Denmark in 1826, Spain in 1855, and the United States in 1862. Her argument is that these dates have been made to carry far too much weight. Because historians have measured Haiti's standing by them, the intervening decades get described as isolation, and Haitian history becomes a straight line from a failed experiment in independence to the poorest country in the hemisphere. What the archives in Haiti, France, Jamaica, England, the United States, the Netherlands and Denmark show instead is a long period in which policies shifted constantly, local officials improvised without instruction, merchants traded legally and illegally, and courts made law. Recognition, she argues, had already happened in pieces long before it was announced. Where this account departs from the standard one: Gaffield rejects the isolation thesis, arguing that the conventional recognition dates conceal decades of diplomatic, economic and legal connection between Haiti and the Atlantic world.

The Sunday dances at Congo Square ended in the 1870s as the French speaking Africans of New Orleans were pushed into American life after the Civil War. The old order of the city had three tiers, white, free person of colour and slave, and the white American Protestant order that replaced it had one line with everybody on one side or the other. Creoles of colour lost standing and money quickly through the last quarter of the century. By its end all the famous Vodou doctors and queens were dead, and the religion went underground while federal, state and city authorities, joined by Black and white Protestant leaders, worked to destroy African folk religion in Louisiana. Black New Orleanians were still half the population. They kept the practice going in the downtown Creole neighbourhoods, in secret societies, and in the Mardi Gras Indian tribes, whose sequined suits and beaded pouches answer to the sequined flags and charged packets of Haiti.