A pamphlet from Paris helps raise the piquets at Les Cayes

The rising at Les Cayes began with a paper weapon. A pamphlet published in Paris by the younger Salomon was used by the anti mulatto party, while his father recruited piquets, the armed peasant bands of the country districts, and exploited the unresolved Dominican boundary question to draw in others. Geffrard's humiliation before Spanish guns the previous year had already cost him support. The government was still strong enough to answer quickly, sending the new steamship named for the day of the republic's proclamation with a hundred sharpshooters, followed by two hundred men and artillery. The rising collapsed and the elder Salomon paid for it along with thirteen ringleaders. Baur places the episode inside a pattern that had begun in September 1859, when a plot to install Guerrier Prophete ended with an assassin firing through a window blind and killing the president's newly married daughter.

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.

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.