Geffrard resigns and slips aboard a French sloop in disguise

Having convened the Senate early in the month and resigned briefly and without ceremony, Geffrard and his family disguised themselves and boarded a French sloop bound for Kingston. He is reported to have remarked as the anchor came up that anarchy would follow his departure. Before leaving he placed executive power in the hands of a ministry of capable men supported by a committee on conciliation, and that improvised government failed to hold the country together. The incoming regime issued decrees of banishment against the former president, his family and his sons in law, purged Geffrardist office holders, revoked commissions issued since early 1865, and removed the legislators elected after the dissolution of 1863. He died in Jamaica on the last day of 1879. Baur's verdict is a qualified success, a man whose beginnings were triumphs and whose conclusions were failures.

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.