Defeat at Sabana Larga ends the Haitian hope of one island

Through the 1850s Haiti made repeated attempts to bring the eastern part of Hispaniola under its control. The defeat of its forces at the battle of Sabana Larga in 1856 ended those attempts. Haitian leaders had held since independence that the island had to be indivisible, on the reasoning that a slaveholding power installed in the east would eventually come west. The fear was not abstract. A ring of slaveholding territories ran from the southern United States through Cuba and Puerto Rico, and Haiti was treated by all of them as an anomaly that ought not to exist. What made the 1850s worse was that Haitian leaders could see the leading politicians of the young Dominican Republic looking for a foreign protector. After Sabana Larga the Haitian aim of political union was abandoned, and the Dominican search for annexation to a larger state went on.

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 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.