A hundred thousand dollar crown for a tent seating eight thousand

The coronation proper took place nearly three years after the proclamation, on the Camp de Mars in Port-au-Prince, under a tent capable of holding seven or eight thousand people. Brandon reports that the regalia came from abroad and that the emperor's crown was said to have cost a hundred thousand dollars, adding that it remained in the possession of the Haitian government when she wrote in 1951. Drums began calling the population before three in the morning. The imperial carriage was drawn by eight grey horses from the United States, and the procession of newly created nobles moved to an open air altar loaded with tapers. An eyewitness account she reproduces stresses how deliberately the court dress imitated an older European style. Brandon uses that borrowing to argue the display was aimed outward, at powers who refused recognition.

Pierrot follows the story into the middle of the century, when the Reverend John Relly Beard published his life of Toussaint in 1853 and a second book in 1863. Beard emphasised his subject's racial purity, wanting it marked that he was wholly without white blood, while also asserting that the negro race was inferior to the highest style of man and that the race at large had as yet no history. He praised Toussaint for proclaiming the doctrine of free trade, and disparaged Dessalines, the man who actually liberated Haiti, as a monster cruel by nature. The mechanism Pierrot draws out is the introduction's admission that no detailed life was accessible to English readers because the only existing memoir had long been out of print. Rainsford's account was out of print in 1853 and still is.

Britain had outlawed the slave trade and spent the middle of the nineteenth century sending envoys to Dahomey to press the kingdom into banning exports and growing palm oil instead. Lieutenant Frederick Forbes recorded a meeting with King Gezo on 4 July 1850. Gezo told him that his nation was a military one, women included, that his income came from selling prisoners of war, and that he could not put his women into the fields because it would kill them. Everyone in the country, he said, was a soldier, and the trade fed them. The argument that Europeans had themselves supplied, that captives who were not sold would be sacrificed instead, had by the 1860s been picked up by the Dahomian court and used back at the British. If he did not sell them, one king pointed out, he would have to kill them, which England would like even less.

The New York Evening Post of 2 September 1854 drew attention to the blackness of Dominicans in order to raise antipathy against them among sections of opinion in the United States. The object was to undermine a plan by the Secretary of State, William L. Marcy, to have Washington formally recognise the Dominican Republic. Shortly afterwards a writer working for the opposite result set out to shrink the black element of the same population, describing Dominicans as made up of Spaniards, Spanish creoles and some Africans and people of colour. The exchange shows a country with dozens of overlapping colour categories being handled by a country that recognised two. Dominicans have had to negotiate the racial paradigms of their North American and European overseers, and on this occasion both governments had reasons of their own to prefer the version that made the Dominican Republic white. In Dominican usage the word indio still commonly stands where black would apply, and black is reserved for Haitians and Africans.