A British warship shells Cap-Haitien and wins Geffrard's war

The northern siege turned on an incident at sea. Rebels captured a government blockade vessel, and when the British brig intervened to protect a chartered English steamer in the roadstead the captured ship was surrendered. The next day the British vice consul was insulted and the flag with him, and on his appeal the British warship entered the harbour and began shelling the rebel vessel and the insurgent positions, keeping up the bombardment until the arsenal exploded. Government troops occupied the abandoned fortifications while Salnave and Delorme took refuge aboard an American ship, and the rebel chief ordered the town fired as he left. Half of Cap-Haitien burned. Baur judges that the government could not have won without this outside intervention and that the victory turned to ashes, because national pride had been wounded a second time by foreign guns acting on Haitian soil.

The Louisiana constitution of 1867 went further towards equality for black residents than any other state charter in the American South. It guaranteed equal treatment in public transportation and public accommodation, and it established the political equality of all men whatever their colour. Descendants of the free people of colour who had left Saint-Domingue two generations earlier shaped its terms, among them the Roudanez, Trevigne and Desdunes families. They also helped carry the Civil Rights Bill of 1868 in Louisiana, and in 1870 they won the desegregation of the public schools, which nineteen Louisiana schools had put into effect by 1874. The legislation did not survive. National measures overrode it, and the next attempt by Rodolphe Desdunes and his Citizens' Committee, the case brought by Homer Plessy, failed in a way that set the whole country backwards. The same families kept working through interracial labour organisations and were back in court in the 1920s.

The siege of Cap-Haïtien dragged through the summer of 1865. The American commissioner Whidden reported on 28 August that the government's army of ten thousand was somewhat demoralized while Salnave's five hundred soldiers and thousand irregulars were composed of very determined men. In November the Royal Navy intervened on the government side, and HMS Bulldog went onto a shoal in the harbor and was lost. Local memory attributes the grounding to Agwé, the lwa who holds the sea. I include that attribution deliberately. A historian's job is not to adjudicate whether a lwa grounded a gunboat. It is to record that a nineteenth century Haitian population explained a British naval humiliation through their own cosmology, and that this explanation circulated and was believed. That is a fact about how the event was received, and reception is history too.

Commodore Arthur Wilmot visited Abomey between December 1862 and January 1863 and noticed a heavy imbalance in the Dahomean population in favour of women. War was one of the necessities of that state, he reasoned, so there was a constant drain on the men, the supply never met the demand, and the result was some five thousand women in the Dahomean army. The Atlantic slave trade sharpened the imbalance, because buyers preferred men. There was a second pressure behind it. From the 1720s to the 1880s the chief rivals of Dahomey were the Yoruba, first the empire of Oyo, to which the Fon paid tribute for half that period, and later the city of Abeokuta. Fon speakers today number under two million and Yoruba speakers about twenty million, and the ratio was probably similar then. Women soldiers could not close a manpower gap of that size, and Abeokuta was never taken.