A president elected for life is made emperor by a new constitution

Soulouque had been elected president for life under the constitution of 1846, and shortly afterwards a new constitution promulgated in October made him emperor. The editors handle this as the second conversion of a republic into an empire in the volume, after 1805, and point out that the amendment of 1849 was made to the 1846 text rather than replacing it outright. They then follow the reversal. At the end of 1858 an insurrection against Soulouque forced him toward exile, and in December of that year the insurgents obtained by decree a return to the constitution of 1846. Some weeks later, with the emperor gone, Geffrard, until then a member of Soulouque's court, became president for life and officially confirmed the restoration of that constitution, which was then amended in 1859 and 1860.

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.

Asiatic cholera reached Jamaica through Port Royal in September 1850. The first reports blamed a steamer from the isthmus of Panama, where the disease had been killing miners on their way to the California gold fields. It crossed the harbour into Kingston within days and moved fast through the crowded streets of the city. By November travellers had carried it into the other parishes. Kingston counted between four and six thousand deaths in the first year alone. A medical officer sent out from England reported that mortality in Jamaica ran at thirty three times the European rate, and that no part of the world had recorded a higher ratio of deaths to population. The epidemic faded late in 1850 and returned briefly in 1854. It was reckoned to have killed forty to fifty thousand people, a tenth to an eighth of the island. Haiti escaped it, because Soulouque kept watch on the ports.

Suzanne Simon Baptiste was described by a contemporary as a very large black woman of about forty with the modesty of a girl of twenty, plain in her tastes, who grew coffee with her own hands while her husband governed the colony. Toussaint said he had chosen her himself against the wishes of his owners, who wanted to marry him to younger women, and that before the revolution he had not left her for an hour. On 7 April 1803 her husband died in his cell at the Fort de Joux and she lost any hope of seeing him again. She lived on in France, poor, under a sky that was not hers, for another forty three years, and died on 19 May 1846 at the age of sixty seven. She had held no public office and made no speeches, and her name opens the line of women set beside the men who made the country.