Two republics share the island and hold seven hundred thousand people

By the eighteen seventies the island carried two independent republics, the Haitian in the west of French origin and the Dominican in the east of Spanish. Haiti held about one third of the territory and a population put at five hundred and fifty thousand, with some authorities saying only four hundred and fifty thousand. The Dominican Republic held two thirds of the territory and a hundred and fifty thousand people. That gave the whole island roughly seven hundred thousand inhabitants across thirty thousand square miles, twenty three to the square mile, on land reckoned capable of supporting seven million. Of the Haitians, no fewer than five hundred thousand, ten elevenths of the total, were of purely African descent, women outnumbered men, and the population was widely believed to be falling rather than rising. People of mixed descent numbered about a hundred and seventy five thousand. The language in the east was Spanish and in the west a French patois.

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.

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.