Lincoln's investigator can find only two hundred colonists left alive

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.

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.

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.