The Sunday dances at Congo Square stop

The Sunday dances at Congo Square ended in the 1870s as the French speaking Africans of New Orleans were pushed into American life after the Civil War. The old order of the city had three tiers, white, free person of colour and slave, and the white American Protestant order that replaced it had one line with everybody on one side or the other. Creoles of colour lost standing and money quickly through the last quarter of the century. By its end all the famous Vodou doctors and queens were dead, and the religion went underground while federal, state and city authorities, joined by Black and white Protestant leaders, worked to destroy African folk religion in Louisiana. Black New Orleanians were still half the population. They kept the practice going in the downtown Creole neighbourhoods, in secret societies, and in the Mardi Gras Indian tribes, whose sequined suits and beaded pouches answer to the sequined flags and charged packets of Haiti.

Geffrard attached his economic hopes to cotton because the American war had removed the world's main supplier. He paid bounties to growers, distributed gins free of charge, and reported that cotton culture had developed extraordinarily in a short time under remunerative prices. The price moved from about eight United States cents a pound in 1859 to roughly thirty five by 1863, at which point the bounties became unnecessary and were replaced by a small export tax. Around twelve hundred black immigrants from the United States and Canada were settled near Saint-Marc to work the fields. Most were unfit for tropical field labour, many died, and most of the rest moved to the towns or went home, with land granted without water and food distributed irregularly. When the Union won in 1865 the boom collapsed, and a long drought had meanwhile driven up the price of food.

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 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.