Soulouque executes Pierre Noire, leader of the southern piquets

After breaking the elite in the capital Soulouque took a punitive expedition through the towns of the south, where executions and arbitrary acts followed his progress. MacLeod stresses that the campaign did not hand the countryside to the piquets, the armed peasant bands of the south whose leaders had expected the fall of Boyer to bring them influence. Their commander Pierre Noire was executed in November. The article uses the killing to make a structural point about the regime. Soulouque removed potential rivals regardless of colour or faction, and the same logic soon reached General Similien, the guard officer who had built the street gangs known as zinglins and who plainly had ambitions of his own. Similien was stripped of influence by stages, the guard was passed to more moderate officers, and he ended under life imprisonment without protest from the men he had led.

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 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.

Dahomey had no writing system in ordinary use and kept its history in the mouths of paid professionals called ahanjito. At the annual customs of 1850 the British official Frederick Forbes counted fifty six of them, performing in pairs and competing with each other for the approval of the crowd. Some were travelling men. The most important held office at court, the post was hereditary, and specialists were attached to particular dead kings so that every reign kept its own troupe. Archibald Dalzel had written in the previous century that on solemn occasions the bards sat at the king's gate and recited the whole history of the country, a recital taking several days and attended by young men with good memories who were training to replace them. One chanter was said to recite the names and praise names of every previous king each morning before the king woke. Forbes called these performances the only form of public education the country had.