Washington finally sends a diplomat to Port-au-Prince

When Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861 the United States still had no diplomatic relations with Haiti, sixty years after independence, because southern objection had blocked recognition. Baur notes that Haiti had been recognised by its own former metropole as early as 1825 and had nonetheless remained an outcast state, slighted even by the Spanish American republics, because it had been born of a slave revolt among slaveholding powers. In his annual message of December 1861 Lincoln said he could see no good reason to persist in withholding recognition of Haitian and Liberian independence. Benjamin Whidden went the following year as the first American representative. Trade weighed in the decision. Soulouque had imposed a discriminatory duty on the goods of nations that refused relations, which had penalised American commerce, and Geffrard removed such restrictions to attract the capital and confidence his economy lacked. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

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 siege of Cap-Haïtien dragged through the summer of 1865. The American commissioner Whidden reported on 28 August that the government's army of ten thousand was somewhat demoralized while Salnave's five hundred soldiers and thousand irregulars were composed of very determined men. In November the Royal Navy intervened on the government side, and HMS Bulldog went onto a shoal in the harbor and was lost. Local memory attributes the grounding to Agwé, the lwa who holds the sea. I include that attribution deliberately. A historian's job is not to adjudicate whether a lwa grounded a gunboat. It is to record that a nineteenth century Haitian population explained a British naval humiliation through their own cosmology, and that this explanation circulated and was believed. That is a fact about how the event was received, and reception is history too.

Gaffield lists the sequence in which the powers eventually granted official diplomatic recognition: France in 1825, the British empire, the Netherlands and Denmark in 1826, Spain in 1855, and the United States in 1862. Her argument is that these dates have been made to carry far too much weight. Because historians have measured Haiti's standing by them, the intervening decades get described as isolation, and Haitian history becomes a straight line from a failed experiment in independence to the poorest country in the hemisphere. What the archives in Haiti, France, Jamaica, England, the United States, the Netherlands and Denmark show instead is a long period in which policies shifted constantly, local officials improvised without instruction, merchants traded legally and illegally, and courts made law. Recognition, she argues, had already happened in pieces long before it was announced. Where this account departs from the standard one: Gaffield rejects the isolation thesis, arguing that the conventional recognition dates conceal decades of diplomatic, economic and legal connection between Haiti and the Atlantic world.