Riche dies and the Senate goes shopping for a president it can steer

The death of President Jean-Baptiste Riche left the constitutional job of choosing a successor to a Senate the elite factions controlled, and those factions were split into two large camps and several small ones. MacLeod describes the search that followed as a search for a specification rather than a man. The compromise candidate had to be someone of modest ability, easy to steer, without a personal following that could be turned against his sponsors, and preferably black, because anti elite feeling had surfaced repeatedly in the four decades since independence. Faustin Soulouque, the head of the presidential guard, matched every line of the specification. The mechanism that mattered was the Senate itself, a body the president later selected in turn, which made the presidency a prize handed out inside a closed circle. MacLeod treats this arrangement, not any personal quirk of Soulouque, as the thing that made the following twelve years possible. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

Geggus ends with the only two cases where he thinks slave rebellion demonstrably changed the emancipation timetable. In May 1848 a mass entry into the town of Saint Pierre and the fighting that followed in northern Martinique led the governor to declare slavery abolished at once, roughly three months before the decree issued by the new revolutionary government in Paris would have taken effect. He is careful about causation, noting that the decision to abolish had already been taken and was itself what provoked the risings, so the rebellions fixed the date rather than the outcome. The Martinique declaration had immediate effects in the other French colonies and in the Danish islands, where a large rising on Saint Croix in July 1848 cut eleven years off a plan the Danish government had announced the previous year to end slavery in 1859.

Britain had outlawed the slave trade and spent the middle of the nineteenth century sending envoys to Dahomey to press the kingdom into banning exports and growing palm oil instead. Lieutenant Frederick Forbes recorded a meeting with King Gezo on 4 July 1850. Gezo told him that his nation was a military one, women included, that his income came from selling prisoners of war, and that he could not put his women into the fields because it would kill them. Everyone in the country, he said, was a soldier, and the trade fed them. The argument that Europeans had themselves supplied, that captives who were not sold would be sacrificed instead, had by the 1860s been picked up by the Dahomian court and used back at the British. If he did not sell them, one king pointed out, he would have to kill them, which England would like even less.

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.