An emperor surrenders after a siege his enemy refused to press

The rebel commander kept his army of about ten thousand two miles from Port-au-Prince, hoping the emperor would abdicate and spare lives. On 13 January he sent a flag of truce and it was refused. He had a private stake in the outcome, since his wife and daughters were being held as hostages inside the city. Desertions did the work that assault would have done and the emperor, surrounded, surrendered on the fifteenth. There followed a few hours of anarchy in which Geffrard's own followers wanted to sack the national treasury, and he stopped them, though Baur notes drily that there was little in it to take. The article emphasises that both ideals and money brought men over, making this one of the least bloody changes of government in Haitian history, and that the restraint was the new leader's deliberate signature.

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.

In 1860 the Haitian state signed a concordat with the Vatican, and French religious congregations began arriving: the Brothers of Christian Instruction, the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny, the Spiritan fathers. Much of the Haitian middle class treated the agreement as progress. It served a narrower purpose. The dominant class had adopted the French model as the definition of civilisation and could not extend that model to the whole population, so popular tradition was assigned a subordinate rank beneath it. The first task of the bishops was building churches, installing a hierarchy and organising parishes. Missionaries who came in with the concordat hoped to end practices they called superstitious and savage and to install the Western order as the reference point for everything. They did not suspect that a population clamouring for priests was also demanding the conditions under which its own religious tradition could keep developing.