Haiti buys recognition from Rome with a campaign against Vodou

Hurbon reads the Concordat concluded with the Vatican as a decisive political transaction rather than a religious settlement. Every Haitian government since independence had been obsessed with securing such an agreement, and when it finally arrived the exchange ran in two directions. Haiti obtained recognition as a free and civilised nation, which mattered enormously against European propaganda that painted the country as given over to cannibalism and sorcery. In return the Church took on the work of pacifying souls, which in practice meant an inquisitorial campaign against Vodou. Hurbon adds a complication usually left out: the governments had wanted a national church staffed by priests in the tradition of the constitutional clergy and the abbé Grégoire, because they suspected the Church as a European power historically bound to slaving and colonising nations. What they got instead was a foreign clergy with a free hand.

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.

The proclamation went out signed by the president and his entire cabinet and was addressed to the world's foreign offices. It rested on the constitutional fiction that the whole island was Haitian, declared that any Spanish landing would be aggression, and denied that Santana and his faction had any right to hand Dominican soil to Spain. Geffrard attacked the claim that the population had willed the annexation, pointing to a population living under a reign of terror and to exiled Dominican patriots who denounced the transfer as treason. His central argument was geographic rather than legal. Two populations on one island have a shared fate in the face of foreign intervention, so each is obliged to guarantee the safety of the other, and he offered the case of Scotland passing suddenly to Russia or France as the test. Baur calls the result a miniature Monroe doctrine.

Gerlus uses two rural movements to show that the line between peasantry and army was porous in a way that shaped Haitian politics. The Piquet movement began in the southern peninsula under Jean-Jacques Acaau, whom he describes as a peasant who had apparently become a soldier. The Caco movement started in the north a generation later and looked to him like an alliance between poor and landless peasants and senior army officers. Between those dates Faustin Soulouque, a peasant who had climbed to the top of the army, ruled from 1847 to 1859 first as president and then as emperor. Gerlus's point is structural. Because holding state power was the reliable route to land and income, insurgency and officeholding were parts of one system, and rural grievance was repeatedly harnessed to the ambitions of men who already held commissions.