American war prices turn Haitian cotton into a boom and then kill it

Geffrard attached his economic hopes to cotton because the American war had removed the world's main supplier. He paid bounties to growers, distributed gins free of charge, and reported that cotton culture had developed extraordinarily in a short time under remunerative prices. The price moved from about eight United States cents a pound in 1859 to roughly thirty five by 1863, at which point the bounties became unnecessary and were replaced by a small export tax. Around twelve hundred black immigrants from the United States and Canada were settled near Saint-Marc to work the fields. Most were unfit for tropical field labour, many died, and most of the rest moved to the towns or went home, with land granted without water and food distributed irregularly. When the Union won in 1865 the boom collapsed, and a long drought had meanwhile driven up the price of food.

Redpath founded The Pine and Palm in Boston on 18 May 1861 as the organ of the movement, dedicated to raising black Americans to full social, political and national equality with whites. Its columns demanded immediate federal abolition, a constitutional convention with or without southern consent, union with the British provinces to the north, and two tropical confederacies settled by white and black Americans, one in the West Indies and one in Central America. Redpath told a Manchester cotton buyer that having failed to break the slave power with lead, practical abolitionists were now willing to try cotton, since free labour in Haiti could undercut slave grown crops. Boyd notes that many readers took Redpath for a black man. The paper ran until 24 July 1862, abusing the cabinet and the Republican party throughout, and endorsing a third party ticket.

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.

Haiti signed a Concordat with the papal see in 1860, ending more than half a century in which the republic had no formal relations with Rome. The second archbishop of Port au Prince, appointed shortly afterward, was a Breton priest named Alexis Jean Marie Guilloux, trained in Brittany and a great admirer of Michel LeNobletz and his painted teaching images. Guilloux founded schools and pressed the missions, and the priests and religious he brought were largely Breton, so Breton devotional pictures spread through Haitian classrooms in the late nineteenth century and after. What came with them was a whole religious world: model ships hung from chapel ceilings, the mermaid Arhes who sank the city of Is beneath the sea, and the festivals called Pardons in which banners are saluted to the four points of the compass and then carried out into the fields. Each has a counterpart in Vodou practice, in the boat of Agwe, in Lasirenn, and in the handling of the drapo.