A president strikes the imperial crown three times with a gavel

The ownerless imperial crown was carried before the restorer of the republic, who used it as an allegory. After a long speech denouncing the exiled Faustin, Geffrard swore fidelity to popular government, announced preliminary political changes, took up a small gavel and struck the crown three times, condemning the object and the regime it stood for. From that day the crown was a museum piece. Speaking at the formal opening of the chamber of representatives, he defined his purpose as conservative liberalism, warning against overthrowing everything in order to rebuild everything and calling for the republican institutions lost under the empire to be reclaimed intact. He told the deputies that organic laws would have to be passed immediately and that recovery depended on the free disposal of national resources through industry, commerce and agriculture, backed by strict economy in the public administration.

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.

After months of preparation Pedro Santana announced the incorporation of Santo Domingo into the Spanish monarchy. Baur quotes the proclamation's opening logic, which told Dominicans that only one man's ambition and revenge had separated them from the mother country and reminded them that Haitians had afterwards ruled their territory until Dominican valour drove them out. The new royal governor general was using the memory of Boyer's occupation to build unity with Spain, and in that he failed. Santana, until then the chief external enemy of Geffrard, became the enemy of Dominican patriots as well. For Haiti the danger was concrete rather than symbolic. A Spanish colony next door threatened the return of slavery to the eastern part of the island and put a European power on a frontier that no Haitian constitution recognised as a frontier at all.

Soulouque was overthrown in 1860, and the Haitian state then settled terms with Rome under which the Catholic faith became the one creed the republic professed on behalf of every citizen. From then on the church mounted campaigns of persecution against the older practice at intervals. Each campaign drove worship further out of sight, and each time it disappeared the newspapers dragged it back into view with a scandal. The pattern set in 1860 held for a century: an institutional church with legal standing, a state that needed international respectability, a religion practised by most of the population with no legal existence at all, and a foreign press that treated every rumour as ethnography. Haitian leaders had wanted the concordat because it placed them on the same footing as European nations. The price was that the government now had an official partner with an interest in destroying what the majority of Haitians believed.