The restored republic revives 1846 and the presidency for life

The first act of the restored republic was to restore the constitution of 1846. Under it the president was chosen by the Senate, whose members he selected in turn, and he had to be at least thirty five, Haitian born and a property owner, with a salary of forty thousand gourdes. Baur identifies the retained life presidency as the fatal clause. Permanent tenure had already provoked several revolutions, because opponents in a country with no fixed term had no route to power except rebellion, so the new president's own longevity became a standing invitation to revolt. The president could also dissolve the congress that held the purse strings. The article treats this attempted return to an earlier constitutional moment as the central weakness of the whole reform programme, since no nation can go back to a day that has passed.

Redpath founded The Pine and Palm in Boston on 18 May 1861 as the organ of the movement, dedicated to raising black Americans to full social, political and national equality with whites. Its columns demanded immediate federal abolition, a constitutional convention with or without southern consent, union with the British provinces to the north, and two tropical confederacies settled by white and black Americans, one in the West Indies and one in Central America. Redpath told a Manchester cotton buyer that having failed to break the slave power with lead, practical abolitionists were now willing to try cotton, since free labour in Haiti could undercut slave grown crops. Boyd notes that many readers took Redpath for a black man. The paper ran until 24 July 1862, abusing the cabinet and the Republican party throughout, and endorsing a third party ticket.

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.