Louisiana writes a constitution a century ahead of its neighbours

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.

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.

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.

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.