Geffrard brings the Vatican back and calls it a second evangelisation

Destin identifies Geffrard's most significant act as restoring relations with the papacy. Ties with the Roman church had been severed during the revolution, and in the intervening decades Vodou had grown rapidly. Geffrard feared that sixty years of open practice would fix an image of the country abroad as a land of heathens and cannibals, and persuaded the Vatican to intervene. The church created archbishoprics and bishoprics in the capital and eventually established Catholicism as the official religion. Destin calls this a second evangelisation, the first having come in 1511 shortly after the first Africans arrived. He traces a long consequence, arguing that the church's later influence brought liberation theology to Haiti in the 1980s, which resonated with particular priests and helped carry one of them into the presidency in 1991.

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.

In 1863 the Dutch colonies and the United States abolished slavery. The two acts fell in the same year at opposite ends of the same system, one by legislation in a small colonial power, the other in the middle of a civil war and applying to territory the government did not yet control. Set beside the British abolition of 1834 and the French of 1848, they show emancipation in the Americas arriving as a run of separate national decisions spread over three decades, each taken with the earlier ones in plain view and argued over in their light. What followed in the Caribbean was departure. Migration out of the islands after emancipation pushed the number of United States residents of Caribbean derivation past three hundred thousand by the 1920s. Haiti had settled the question for itself in 1804 by revolution, six decades before the last of these acts.

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.