A coronation staged with a priest the Pope never authorised to attend

Haiti had no regularised Catholic hierarchy, and Soulouque tried repeatedly to obtain one along with a concordat, but he never relaxed his conditions enough for the church to accept them. For the coronation he needed a churchman to supply the sacred element, following the Napoleonic precedent he understood perfectly well. The Pope refused to send an archbishop and was persuaded, for the sake of the weak Haitian church, to send an ecclesiastical superior instead. By a mixture of flattery and threat the emperor obtained that cleric for the ceremony without papal authorisation for the act. MacLeod reads the episode as a measure of the ruler's nationalism, since he took the legitimacy the church could confer while giving it almost nothing in return, and simultaneously encouraged the Vodou priesthood his predecessors had scorned, using it as an instrument of social control across the country. Where this account departs from the standard one: Where contemporaries read imperial dealings with Vodou as gross superstition, MacLeod treats them as the first political legitimation of the religion by a Haitian head of state.

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.

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.

In 1854 Emile Nau published his history of the caciques of Haiti, drawing attention to the near total extermination of a whole people by the Spanish invaders. Nicholls quotes his demand that Haitians should not ignore the origins and past of their country, and the claim that the last of that people were companions in servitude of the first African ancestors on the same soil, so that the African and the Indian were enchained together. The mechanism is genealogical. By writing the indigenous population into the national story, the historians of the elite could ground Haitian nationhood in the land rather than only in the plantation, while keeping the argument about racial equality that the whole school shared. Nicholls places the book alongside Ardouin and Saint-Remy as part of a single ideological project rather than as an independent antiquarian work.