The first drive on Azua collapses and the emperor barely escapes

March 1849 opened Soulouque's campaign to recover the eastern part of the island. The Haitians advanced on Azua while dissension divided Santo Domingo, but reports of the massacres and of imminent doom rallied the Dominicans, who struck back and overwhelmed the advance guard. Soulouque himself barely escaped and retreated westward. Baur gives the mechanism of the claim as constitutional and fiscal rather than merely vengeful: Haitians had insisted since independence that the state embraced the whole island, since Spain had ceded the east to France in 1795, and successive constitutions declared the island indivisible, while the customs revenue of the eastern ports was presented as necessary to service the debt to France. Pedro Santana's privateers under the French adventurer Fagalde then raided the Haitian coast as far as Dame Marie.

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.

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.