Haiti declares a Spanish landing next door would be naked aggression

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.

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.

The United States government put the lives of nearly five hundred freed people into the hands of an adventurer named Bernard Kock, who carried them to Ile a Vache, an island off the south coast of Haiti that the Department of the Interior had leased to him with the consent of the Haitian government. President Lincoln gave the scheme his blessing. The counts that came back are exact. Of four hundred and thirty one people, three hundred and seventy eight were still there. Of the fifty three missing, eight had deserted and forty five had died. Thirty one of those remaining were sick and four of them died later. For six weeks Kock's company provided no housing and no rations, while handcuffs, chains and wooden stocks were plentiful. On 2 July 1864 Congress passed an act prohibiting the use of federal money for the colonization of free black people, and no American government funded such a venture again.

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.