The first empress dies at Gonaives and the government stays away

In her last year Claire Heureuse was taken in by Madame Chancy, the widow of a grandson of Dessalines, who travelled from Gonaives to Saint-Marc to fetch her and share her bread and her house. She died in the night of 8 to 9 August 1858. The funeral was a fine one and the government took no part in it. The abbe Gerdolles, priest of Gonaives, sang the mass. The newspapers passed over the death in silence. Eleven days later a short notice appeared on the second page of the commercial paper announcing that the widow of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, empress in 1805, had died in the town, and recording that the French and English vice-consuls, Roux and McGuffie, had followed her coffin, which was carried to the grave on men's shoulders. On the stone in the cemetery at Gonaives is the line telling the passer-by to consult the first pages of the country's history.

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.

The United States government put the lives of nearly five hundred freed people into the hands of an adventurer named Bernard Kock, who carried them to Ile a Vache, an island off the south coast of Haiti that the Department of the Interior had leased to him with the consent of the Haitian government. President Lincoln gave the scheme his blessing. The counts that came back are exact. Of four hundred and thirty one people, three hundred and seventy eight were still there. Of the fifty three missing, eight had deserted and forty five had died. Thirty one of those remaining were sick and four of them died later. For six weeks Kock's company provided no housing and no rations, while handcuffs, chains and wooden stocks were plentiful. On 2 July 1864 Congress passed an act prohibiting the use of federal money for the colonization of free black people, and no American government funded such a venture again.

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.