Three defeats in the east strip an emperor of his authority

The third campaign into the Dominican Republic ended in three humiliating defeats and heavy casualties, and what came home was the remnant of an army. MacLeod dates the unravelling of the regime from this moment. The emperor was still feared, but the mystical authority that had made his coalition of army, nobility and Vodou hierarchy work had evaporated. He alternated for about three years between harsh repression of dissent and complete indifference to government. A severe depression struck in 1857 and continued through 1858, driven by a failure of the coffee crop and falling prices abroad. The article stresses that the eastern policy was not simple aggression, since the emperor told European consuls repeatedly that he cared little about possessing the eastern territory and had offered the Dominicans a nominal confederation that would leave their internal affairs alone while closing the island to foreign powers.

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.

Soulouque launched his second invasion in December 1855 and occupied the abandoned town of Las Matas by the 17th, then lost at St Thome shortly afterwards. In a fit of anger he ordered the immediate execution of Generals Dessalines and Christophe, grandsons of Haiti's two earlier crowned heads. Baur reports the American press ridiculing the campaign, with a main body of eighteen thousand put to flight by four hundred Dominicans and a field piece, and the emperor nearly taken before staff officers saved him at the cost of several of their own lives. The mechanism of the collapse was that Soulouque escaped with roughly three million dollars in currency and eighty thousand in Spanish paper while abandoning most of his men. He blamed treason. After that the empire was on the defensive.

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.