Geffrard sets his terms: fifteen dollars a head, citizenship in a year

Redpath wrote to Geffrard on 4 August 1859 with a list of questions, and the president's answers became the basis of the whole scheme. Land was available on long credit anywhere in the country, with purchase, rent or sharecropping to be settled on arrival. The government would advance passage at fifteen dollars per adult and half that for children. Americans could settle together in communities of two or three hundred families if they wished. They would be exempt from the usual nine years of military service, would receive Haitian citizenship after one year, and non Catholics were guaranteed complete freedom of worship. Boyd notes what the terms left out. Schooling, sharply different social customs, ignorance of Haitian Creole and the health risks of a tropical climate were passed over lightly in the guidebook Redpath published in 1860, which told cautious readers that yellow fever kept to the ports and marshes.

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.

By the autumn of 1861 the reports coming back were uniformly bad. Two settlers named Davis and Briscoe complained of delays in surveying and in settling conflicting claims, said the reception building at Saint-Marc had a thatched roof, and that the drainage canals promised for their land were never finished. Once allotments were made, families with no house on their ground walked six or seven miles each way in tropical rain with little strength left for cultivation. Joseph Williams, who had gone out in February 1861, returned with fever, dysentery and rheumatism after his wife and children died. His land lay three miles from the river, wells filled with rain as fast as they were dug, and the family drank stagnant water. The prefabricated cottages shipped from Boston had no floors, so doors and shutters were taken down for beds.

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.