Geffrard is toppled and the opening between the two states closes

Fabre Geffrard was driven from the Haitian presidency in 1867. Jean Price Mars, looking back from the 1950s, treated that as the moment when a possible settlement between Haiti and the Dominican Republic slipped away. Geffrard had been the first Haitian head of state to accept that the two peoples would not become one, and he argued that Haiti should help its neighbour live in independence and freedom, on the condition that the eastern republic be kept clear of every form of imperialism. Price Mars called that the sacramental basis for reconciliation. Haitian politics, which turned over governments quickly in these decades, removed the man before the policy could take hold. From the 1870s onward relations between the two governments consisted largely of what Price Mars named the era of questions of limits, a long series of border negotiations that were interrupted for years at a time and settled nothing.

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.

In the late nineteenth century the slave trades reached far enough inland in East Africa to break up the Shambaa kingdom, the Gweno kingdom and the Pare states in the Pangani valley. This was two generations after Britain outlawed its own Atlantic traffic and while abolition was being celebrated in Europe. The Indian Ocean and Red Sea trades were still running. What happened in the valley followed a pattern seen across the continent. Raiding between neighbouring communities made weapons necessary for self defence, weapons came from traders in exchange for captives, and the need for captives drove further raiding. Historians call the loop the gun slave cycle. Its political result was the collapse of existing government and its replacement by armed bands, together with the corruption of the courts, since a community could meet a tribute demand by convicting its own members and selling them.