The cocomacaque becomes the emblem of Haitian policing

From the 1850s a single object came to stand for repression in Haitian life. A foreigner named Tizon sent the Society of Pharmacy in Paris a stout stick cut from a palm stem, used to flog people, remarking that no cudgel matched it for strength and hardness. The French writer Paul Deleage described the cocomacaque as a stick carried by everyone in the country, made of a very light and unbreakable wood, and formidable in a Haitian hand. The British diplomat Spenser St John wrote that the police were the worst run of all Haitian institutions, that special commissioners existed under the prefects while soldiers generally did the work, and that they walked the streets with the stick and used it on anyone arrested, who was treated as guilty from the moment of arrest. In 1881 Edgar La Selve set instruction spread in profusion against the cocomacaque as the way to strengthen the intelligence of a people.

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.

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.

By the autumn of 1861 the reports coming back were uniformly bad. Two settlers named Davis and Briscoe complained of delays in surveying and in settling conflicting claims, said the reception building at Saint-Marc had a thatched roof, and that the drainage canals promised for their land were never finished. Once allotments were made, families with no house on their ground walked six or seven miles each way in tropical rain with little strength left for cultivation. Joseph Williams, who had gone out in February 1861, returned with fever, dysentery and rheumatism after his wife and children died. His land lay three miles from the river, wells filled with rain as fast as they were dug, and the family drank stagnant water. The prefabricated cottages shipped from Boston had no floors, so doors and shutters were taken down for beds.