Six men in a canoe take Gonaives and proclaim the republic restored

Conspirators in the Artibonite valley sent a delegation to Geffrard asking him to lead a national rising rather than a regional one. He hesitated and then agreed. Faustin, growing suspicious of his own duke, ordered the arrest, but earlier that night Geffrard had left the capital quietly in a small boat. He landed at Gonaives without money, men or arms. Three men on shore and the half dozen in the canoe attacked the town and took it without bloodshed, which Baur reads as a measure of how deep the disaffection ran. Geffrard then raised his standard and proclaimed the republic. A provisional government was formed, the north rose immediately, and the south and west stayed quiet until the emperor took the field himself, at which point the imperial army dissolved. By New Year the rebels held most of the country. Where this account departs from the standard one: Baur places the proclamation on 23 December while noting that Geffrard's own steamship was named 22 de Decembre for the day he proclaimed the republic, so the article carries both dates.

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.

Commodore Arthur Wilmot visited Abomey between December 1862 and January 1863 and noticed a heavy imbalance in the Dahomean population in favour of women. War was one of the necessities of that state, he reasoned, so there was a constant drain on the men, the supply never met the demand, and the result was some five thousand women in the Dahomean army. The Atlantic slave trade sharpened the imbalance, because buyers preferred men. There was a second pressure behind it. From the 1720s to the 1880s the chief rivals of Dahomey were the Yoruba, first the empire of Oyo, to which the Fon paid tribute for half that period, and later the city of Abeokuta. Fon speakers today number under two million and Yoruba speakers about twenty million, and the ratio was probably similar then. Women soldiers could not close a manpower gap of that size, and Abeokuta was never taken.