Haiti's only emperor after Christophe dies unnoticed at Petit-Goave

The former emperor outlived the man who displaced him in power. After Geffrard was himself driven out, Soulouque came back to Haiti and died at Petit-Goave, by then largely forgotten. MacLeod uses the death to open his final assessment. He grants the cruelty and the tyranny, which even the few admirers concede, and then argues that the record of policy shows a realist and a capable if ruthless diplomat rather than the clown of the standard portraits. The legacy he identifies is threefold. The regime gave the black nationalist party its first lasting hold on the state, so that in the seventy two years between the fall of Boyer and the American occupation men of mixed descent governed for only eight. It legitimised Vodou as a political resource. And it left a template of terror, patronage and nationalism that later rulers would reuse.

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.

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.

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.