HMS Bulldog runs aground at Cap-Haïtien and the Royal Navy burns the town

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.

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.

The Sunday dances at Congo Square ended in the 1870s as the French speaking Africans of New Orleans were pushed into American life after the Civil War. The old order of the city had three tiers, white, free person of colour and slave, and the white American Protestant order that replaced it had one line with everybody on one side or the other. Creoles of colour lost standing and money quickly through the last quarter of the century. By its end all the famous Vodou doctors and queens were dead, and the religion went underground while federal, state and city authorities, joined by Black and white Protestant leaders, worked to destroy African folk religion in Louisiana. Black New Orleanians were still half the population. They kept the practice going in the downtown Creole neighbourhoods, in secret societies, and in the Mardi Gras Indian tribes, whose sequined suits and beaded pouches answer to the sequined flags and charged packets of Haiti.

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.