Betrayal from inside, not popular rising, ends the Haitian empire

MacLeod ends the regime with an argument about how it fell. He had ignored the growing influence of Fabre Geffrard, a man he would have shot without hesitation five years earlier, and when Geffrard left the capital and declared against him the emperor made little effort to defend his position before leaving for Jamaica. The article insists the collapse came through treachery from within rather than the exhausted nation rising as one behind an untainted hero. Revolts in the fallen emperor's name continued sporadically for several years and were put down with the usual ferocity. He returned home almost forgotten after Geffrard himself fell and died at Petit-Goave on 6 August 1867. MacLeod's closing verdict is that this ruler kept the republic intact through the high tide of American expansionism and shattered the political power of the mixed race elite for two generations. Where this account departs from the standard one: The standard account has a weary nation rising behind Geffrard; MacLeod holds that the regime was destroyed by treachery inside it, which is why it collapsed so quickly.

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.