Soulouque breaks the understudy policy and arms the Zinglins

Faustin Soulouque held power from 1847 to 1859 and stopped serving as anyone's figurehead. His government worked systematically to strengthen and widen the position of the black section of the ruling class inside the economic arrangements already in place, which makes it the first version of a noiriste politics in Haiti. It rested on a parallel police force, the Zinglins, whose relation to the regular army anticipates what the macoute bands would be under Duvalier a century later. The state held the export monopoly on coffee and timber, and the systematic looting of public funds became an institution, worked out in collusion with the large foreign trading houses. His successor Fabre Geffrard, in office from 1859 to 1867, led a mulatto government. Sylvain Salnave, himself a mulatto, challenged him and took power in 1867 on the strength of a popular agitation driven by the falling coffee price and the cost of living. A coalition of both factions beat him in 1869.

The New York Evening Post of 2 September 1854 drew attention to the blackness of Dominicans in order to raise antipathy against them among sections of opinion in the United States. The object was to undermine a plan by the Secretary of State, William L. Marcy, to have Washington formally recognise the Dominican Republic. Shortly afterwards a writer working for the opposite result set out to shrink the black element of the same population, describing Dominicans as made up of Spaniards, Spanish creoles and some Africans and people of colour. The exchange shows a country with dozens of overlapping colour categories being handled by a country that recognised two. Dominicans have had to negotiate the racial paradigms of their North American and European overseers, and on this occasion both governments had reasons of their own to prefer the version that made the Dominican Republic white. In Dominican usage the word indio still commonly stands where black would apply, and black is reserved for Haitians and Africans.

In the 1850s despair at the Fugitive Slave Law and at tightening restrictions across the northern states pushed black leaders to reopen a question many had closed. Boyd quotes Frederick Douglass, a firm opponent of African colonisation, telling Americans in 1853 that the continent and the nearby islands already held more than twelve million people of African descent who needed only organisation to become one powerful nation. The emigration convention held at Cleveland in 1854 sent James Theodore Holly to Haiti to open discussions with the government of Faustin Soulouque, but the regime fell before anything was settled and a new republic under Fabre Geffrard took its place. Geffrard also wanted colonists from the United States, and several hundred people sailed from New Orleans for Port-au-Prince in 1859. What was still missing, in Boyd's account, was a definite programme.

Through the 1850s Haiti made repeated attempts to bring the eastern part of Hispaniola under its control. The defeat of its forces at the battle of Sabana Larga in 1856 ended those attempts. Haitian leaders had held since independence that the island had to be indivisible, on the reasoning that a slaveholding power installed in the east would eventually come west. The fear was not abstract. A ring of slaveholding territories ran from the southern United States through Cuba and Puerto Rico, and Haiti was treated by all of them as an anomaly that ought not to exist. What made the 1850s worse was that Haitian leaders could see the leading politicians of the young Dominican Republic looking for a foreign protector. After Sabana Larga the Haitian aim of political union was abandoned, and the Dominican search for annexation to a larger state went on.