The Pelletier affair, one month after Washington finally recognizes Haiti

The United States refused to recognize Haiti for fifty nine years, because recognizing it meant seating a black ambassador in Washington while the South still held four million people in bondage. Lincoln finally extended recognition in 1862, during the Civil War, when the Confederacy had removed those senators from the chamber. Almost immediately came the Pelletier case. On 27 July 1863 the Haitian government, through Roumain, submitted a formal defense including Captain Hubbard's report, arguing that Pelletier's vessel the William had been engaged in illicit activity and was lawfully seized under Haitian law. Washington felt obliged to protect an American citizen abroad and equally anxious not to rupture with a newly recognized ally mid war. Note the shape of it. Recognition arrives, and the first thing that follows is a dispute about whether Haitian law applies to an American in Haitian waters. That question never really closes.

An anti annexation movement rose at Moca, in the Cibao region, in 1861, and grew into the war Dominicans call the War of Restoration, fought from 1863 to 1865 against Spanish rule. Dominican rebels used Haiti as a base. Parties of them crossed back over the border accompanied by Haitians, some regular soldiers and some volunteers, who helped clear foreign troops off the land. Spanish reprisals forced President Fabre Geffrard into a public show of neutrality while he went on supplying the insurgents with provisions, and he also worked the diplomatic channels for an armistice and a Spanish withdrawal. Jean Price Mars treated the war as a turning point for both countries. Dominicans and Haitians had fought a common enemy together, and afterwards Haitian governments gave up the old doctrine that the island had to be one state. What replaced it, from the 1870s, was a long argument about where exactly the border ran.

In 1864 the New Orleans paper L'Union became La Tribune de la Nouvelle Orleans. Louis Charles Roudanez stayed active in it and Paul Trevigne, another descendant of Saint-Domingue refugees, ran it as chief editor. They argued for black suffrage in editorials, political articles, fiction and poetry, and they printed an English edition and posted it to members of Congress in Washington. Two years before, they had opened a campaign to desegregate the public schools and the streetcars of the city. They set up the Louisiana chapter of the National Equal Rights League, founded the Friends of Universal Suffrage in 1865, and came back in 1867 for civic equality, voting rights and access to public facilities. Trevigne pushed hard for the desegregation of Masonic lodges as well. The families doing this work descended from people who had left Saint-Domingue during its revolution, and in Louisiana they were pressing the claim that revolution had made.

Gerlus uses two rural movements to show that the line between peasantry and army was porous in a way that shaped Haitian politics. The Piquet movement began in the southern peninsula under Jean-Jacques Acaau, whom he describes as a peasant who had apparently become a soldier. The Caco movement started in the north a generation later and looked to him like an alliance between poor and landless peasants and senior army officers. Between those dates Faustin Soulouque, a peasant who had climbed to the top of the army, ruled from 1847 to 1859 first as president and then as emperor. Gerlus's point is structural. Because holding state power was the reliable route to land and income, insurgency and officeholding were parts of one system, and rural grievance was repeatedly harnessed to the ambitions of men who already held commissions.