Settlers walk seven miles to fields they cannot drink beside

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.

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.

Twelve days after the first proclamation Geffrard had issued a second one addressed to Dominicans, denouncing Spaniards as slaveholders and urging them to arms under a cry of liberty or death, and his administration had begun giving weapons to Dominicans resisting the annexation. Spain responded by sending General Rubalcava with a squadron. Anchored off Port-au-Prince, the Spanish gave a forty eight hour ultimatum demanding an indemnity of fifty thousand pounds for damage done by Dominicans sheltering in Haiti and a salute to the Spanish flag that had gone unreturned. The president argued, then took the advice of the resident foreign representatives led by the British consul and settled for five thousand pounds and the salute. An angry crowd made the political cost immediate. Baur treats this humiliation as the beginning of the slide, and notes that Dominican exiles in Haiti read the retreat as betrayal.

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.