A New Orleans daily run by refugee descendants demands the vote

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.

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.

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.

Boyd closes with the accounting. A New York businessman with Haitian connections spoke to a few of the settlers in 1863 and found that some had taken work with foreign merchants in Port-au-Prince and then fled inland when an order came to conscript them into the Haitian army. When D. C. Donohue went out early in 1864 at President Lincoln's request to look into the wreckage of another colonisation project, he could locate only two hundred survivors of the whole enterprise. The others had died or scattered into the surrounding population, and few had the means to return to the United States because the government held a lien on their labour. Estimates for the number carried during 1862 range between five hundred and a thousand, the sailing records having not survived. Boyd's verdict is that the agency achieved surprising reach in a time of crisis and still ended in nothing.