Defilee's son saves Fabre Geffrard from death

One of Defilee's children became an officer. Colonel Condol Basile served as an officer of the maréchaussée, the rural police, under Faustin Soulouque, and on 27 December 1858 he saved Fabre Geffrard from death. Geffrard was Soulouque's leading general and was about to move against him. He fled that night, reached Gonaives and proclaimed the republic in January 1859, and Soulouque's empire ended within weeks. Geffrard then governed Haiti for eight years. The thread here is a family one. The woman who gathered Dessalines out of the street in 1806 had a son who fifty two years later kept the next change of regime from beginning with a murder. Both acts were performed by people holding no rank that mattered, at moments when the state was in the hands of men who did.

The first company, sixty two people, sailed from Boston on 25 December 1860, followed by another from New York City on 3 January 1861, forty one from Boston in February, ten in March and a hundred and sixty two from New Haven and Boston in April, making two hundred and seventy five by the first of May. Four more voyages in May and June carried a hundred and forty, and the movement's paper listed ten sailings and seven hundred and fifty seven emigrants in the closing months of the year, with a total of one thousand and seventy six recorded from mid December 1860 to the end of October 1861. Boyd sets against these numbers the difficulty of getting ships once the war began, with charter costs and insurance rising and Confederate raiders reported off every northern port, which made British registry safer and dearer.

In 1861 General Pedro Santana, then president of the Dominican Republic and a caudillo who had helped separate the country from Haiti seventeen years earlier, negotiated its annexation to Spain. He justified the surrender of sovereignty by the Haitian threat, and a whole school of Dominican historians afterwards accepted that justification. Later in the same decade Buenaventura Baez tried to arrange annexation to the United States instead. Jean Price Mars, the Haitian writer who studied both halves of the island, called the 1861 annexation a crime and a catastrophe, because it planted an imperial power on Hispaniola, which Haitian policy had worked to prevent since independence. Fabre Geffrard, president of Haiti at the time, said Spanish control of Santo Domingo foretold the end of Haitian freedom. He meant two things at once, the survival of the Haitian state and the abolition of slavery, since Spain still held enslaved people in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

In March 1841 Gregory XVI told Bishop Rosati, sent to Haiti on a mission that nearly worked, that he could not die easy without seeing this poor abandoned country become Christian again. He died in 1846 without it. The obstruction was not theological. Haiti had a functioning religious life and did not need Rome's permission to have one. The blockage was that recognizing Haiti ecclesiastically meant recognizing Haiti, and the Vatican was not going to move ahead of the Catholic monarchies. The Concordat finally signed in 1860 mattered for a reason that is usually skipped: it handed the entire education system to French religious orders. So the schooling of the Haitian elite for the next century was designed abroad, taught in French, and structurally hostile to the language and religion of the majority. The 1860 signature is why the 1980 language debate was still being fought.