The Dutch colonies and the United States abolish slavery

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.

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.

Opposition hardened through 1861 and 1862. The Anglo-African, which had begun by taking pride in a Haitian flag flying in Boston harbour, was by August 1861 printing objections that a labourer with four or five dependents had no more chance of getting away than a plantation slave, since he had to repay passage both ways plus vague extras and did not own his land for seven years. An anti emigration meeting in Canada in October denounced agents of either colour who tampered with the interests of black people under cover of fighting slavery with Haitian cotton, and in March 1862 the same paper wrote that thousands would like to elevate Redpath to the nearest tree. On 30 July 1862 free black residents of Washington met to deal with him. Boyd treats that insult as the point at which Redpath gave up and joined the Union armies as a correspondent.

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.