Saint-Remy publishes the wrong manuscript and adds a plural

Girard shows that the standard text is doubly misleading. The Haitian historian Joseph Saint-Remy published the document in Paris in 1853 under the title Memoires, and the plural gave it an autobiographical cast that later readers, including Desormeaux, built on by placing Toussaint in the tradition of French memoirists. The original is titled in the singular, and Toussaint called it his report in another letter, which fits a text that says almost nothing about his life before 1791 and is devoted to defending his recent conduct. Worse, Saint-Remy did not use the manuscript in Toussaint's own hand but a secretarial version rendered into standard French, and was so appalled by the confusion of the original that he considered rewriting it entirely. Girard also corrects the claim that General Martial Besse helped compose it, since Besse reached Fort de Joux only after Toussaint died. Where this account departs from the standard one: Corrects Saint-Remy's plural title, his choice of the secretarial copy over the autograph, and his claim that Martial Besse assisted in the writing.

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 the 1850s despair at the Fugitive Slave Law and at tightening restrictions across the northern states pushed black leaders to reopen a question many had closed. Boyd quotes Frederick Douglass, a firm opponent of African colonisation, telling Americans in 1853 that the continent and the nearby islands already held more than twelve million people of African descent who needed only organisation to become one powerful nation. The emigration convention held at Cleveland in 1854 sent James Theodore Holly to Haiti to open discussions with the government of Faustin Soulouque, but the regime fell before anything was settled and a new republic under Fabre Geffrard took its place. Geffrard also wanted colonists from the United States, and several hundred people sailed from New Orleans for Port-au-Prince in 1859. What was still missing, in Boyd's account, was a definite programme.

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.