The reformer dissolves the legislature that asked for a budget

By this year the president's personal honesty was being questioned in the legislature and rumours that he had grown rich were gaining ground, while government moved increasingly by presidential order. When the assembly demanded an itemised budget he dissolved it. Baur marks the moment as the end of the reform era and the point at which the constitutional power to dissolve congress, retained in 1846 and restored in 1859, did its predictable work. New elections followed within weeks and scarcely five thousand ballots were cast. Addressing the new body the president told it, as many other rulers have, that blind opposition had forced the dissolution and that the country was waiting for the promised improvements. Instead revolt became the routine of national life, with risings under Longuefosse and others, and then the northern rebellion of Silvain Salnave that would eventually drive him out.

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.

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.

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.