Madiou declares the Taino absorbed rather than exterminated

In the first volume of his Histoire d'Haïti, Thomas Madiou argues for the disappearance of the Taino on grounds of absorption rather than complete extermination: until the middle of the eighteenth century certain families kept unmixed descent and used the title of cacique, but by his own day no Haitian belonged directly to that race. Perry notes that Madiou's narration collapses racial purity into the survival of social structures, leaving the reader to assume Taino social practice ended with intermarriage, which was convenient for the new state since he had described Taino families as exercising a limited legal autonomy. His contemporary Émile Nau made a stronger case for continuity, stressing partial descent and the survival of Taino words and songs, but still denied that nineteenth-century Haitians were direct heirs. Where this account departs from the standard one: Perry argues that if one drops the requirement that aboriginal people be racially pure to count as such, the habitual claim that the Taino were eliminated on Hispaniola becomes an overstatement, and she notes that Moreau de Saint-Méry's own account, which records people with special legal status, unduly minimises their presence.

In March and April 1848 Faustin Soulouque, then president of Haiti, broke the political families of the south. The trigger was the killing of Celigny Ardouin, a former deputy accused of conspiring against the government. The fighting reached Port-au-Prince and ended in the massacre of members of several southern households. More than seven hundred surviving relatives took shelter in the British legation. In one incident men hunting refugees came to the consul's steps and found a Union Jack laid across them, and none of them would cross it. Minutes before the killing started, Soulouque had sent a note to the British consul Ussher at the palace promising that all foreigners were under his protection. Ussher saw the events and wrote that the object was to strike terror into the respectable mulattoes whom Soulouque had always taken for his enemies. Afterwards Haitians left for Jamaica in numbers larger than any earlier wave of the decade.

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.

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.