A concordat with Rome makes Catholicism the official religion of every Haitian

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.

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 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.