Haiti wins the right to name its own bishops and Rome accepts them

Haiti had gone more than a generation without formal relations with the Holy See, with the result that by 1860 the trained foreign clergy had disappeared, about thirty priests served the whole country and untrained men were improvising the rites. The convention concluded with the papal plenipotentiary organised and regulated Catholic worship in the republic. It promised the church protection as the majority faith, erected Port-au-Prince into an archbishopric, provided for further bishoprics, and obliged the treasury to pay the higher clergy a salary. In exchange the president gained the right to name archbishops and bishops, whom the Holy See would then canonically install. Bishops, vicars general, vicars and parish priests all had to swear obedience and fidelity to the government established by the constitution and to refrain from acting against the rights and interests of the republic. Two further conventions in 1861 filled in the detail. Where this account departs from the standard one: Baur reports Janvier's objection that the concordat swapped a religion of resistance for a better organised clergy that might outlast the state, and that Vodou could have been used to rally the peasantry instead.

The first company, sixty two people, sailed from Boston on 25 December 1860, followed by another from New York City on 3 January 1861, forty one from Boston in February, ten in March and a hundred and sixty two from New Haven and Boston in April, making two hundred and seventy five by the first of May. Four more voyages in May and June carried a hundred and forty, and the movement's paper listed ten sailings and seven hundred and fifty seven emigrants in the closing months of the year, with a total of one thousand and seventy six recorded from mid December 1860 to the end of October 1861. Boyd sets against these numbers the difficulty of getting ships once the war began, with charter costs and insurance rising and Confederate raiders reported off every northern port, which made British registry safer and dearer.

In 1861 General Pedro Santana, then president of the Dominican Republic and a caudillo who had helped separate the country from Haiti seventeen years earlier, negotiated its annexation to Spain. He justified the surrender of sovereignty by the Haitian threat, and a whole school of Dominican historians afterwards accepted that justification. Later in the same decade Buenaventura Baez tried to arrange annexation to the United States instead. Jean Price Mars, the Haitian writer who studied both halves of the island, called the 1861 annexation a crime and a catastrophe, because it planted an imperial power on Hispaniola, which Haitian policy had worked to prevent since independence. Fabre Geffrard, president of Haiti at the time, said Spanish control of Santo Domingo foretold the end of Haitian freedom. He meant two things at once, the survival of the Haitian state and the abolition of slavery, since Spain still held enslaved people in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

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.