The archbishop mistakes a demand for priests for a demand for Rome

Monseigneur Guilloux was archbishop of Port-au-Prince from 1870 to 1885, and he wrote that the numerous parishes deprived of priests were crying out for pastors, each competing to be first to have its own curate, and that satisfying them all proved impossible. He read the demand as evidence of Catholic hunger. By the time he arrived the Church had been present in the territory for the whole history of slavery, and the population already held its own reading of Christianity, in which the rites, the saints and the symbols had long been annexed to the purposes of Vodou. Masses and ceremonies for the dead sat inside the framework of Vodou religious life. Being Catholic and serving the spirits became a single reality that still marks the country. Only a thin layer of privileged families entered the assimilation the missionaries had in mind.

Between 1868 and 1877 descendants of the refugees who had left Saint Domingue held elected office across the American South. F. H. Fyall sat in the Georgia House in 1868. George L. Fayerman sat in the Virginia House from 1869 to 1871. Robert C. DeLarge and Alonzo J. Ransier both sat in the South Carolina House from 1868 to 1870 and then went to the United States House of Representatives, DeLarge from 1871 to 1873 and Ransier from 1873 to 1875. Felix C. Antoine sat in the Louisiana House and Cesar C. Antoine in the Louisiana Senate, both from 1868 to 1872. Cesar Antoine then served as lieutenant governor of Louisiana from 1872 to 1876 and Richard H. Gleaves as lieutenant governor of South Carolina from 1872 to 1877. The generation that lost these seats is the one that organised the challenge to segregation in New Orleans.

Alexander W. Moir gave his inaugural speech as the newly arrived chief executive of Dominica to the local assembly on 25 July 1872. He asked how an island with over twenty seven thousand inhabitants could leave so much land uncultivated, and supplied his own answer: the evil of squatting was not unknown, and a commendable and rapidly increasing class of peasant proprietors was in existence, which left men free of the necessity to labour and able to give or withhold their work at pleasure. It was the first acknowledgment by a Dominican official that the island had a peasantry and that the peasantry owned land. His audience was the shrinking group of immigrant planters and the coloured elite who controlled the elected House, a group London had decided needed supervision. The Colonial Office had just folded Dominica into the federal colony of the Leeward Islands and Moir was the first executive under the new title. His presidency lasted less than a year.

In 1876 the British authorities tried to fine Dahomey over the treatment of their honorary vice consul at the port of Whydah. King Glele protested that in all the books written about Dahomey by the French, the Portuguese or the English, from the founding of the kingdom down to his own reign and his father's, no such fine had ever been paid, and that they should look into those books and find such a case if they could. Dahomey kept its history by mouth, but the court had some access to the European written record, whether by reading it or through the reports of visitors. Twenty six years earlier Forbes had watched a woman soldier at a public festival hold up a piece of paper and say that the heir apparent had given it to her for the king, to keep the records of the country on. Law allows that European books may have fed back into Dahomian tradition before colonial rule began.