1861–1866: (Sedition, Conspiracy, and Attentat: The Fifteen Coups Against Geffrard): Geffrard labored to restart Haitian agriculture, stimulating exports, fo…

1861–1866: (Sedition, Conspiracy, and Attentat: The Fifteen Coups Against Geffrard): Geffrard labored to restart Haitian agriculture, stimulating exports, fostering cotton to exploit the dislocation of world markets caused by the American Civil War — cotton exports jumped from $144,000 in 1861 to $2,892,000 three years later — then the bottom dropped out as crops failed in 1865–1866 and the reunited United States resumed exporting cotton. (12) Fiscal practice and finance never unfolded to Geffrard: commencing with a deficit of 2 million gourdes in 1859, he operated on a consistent and ever mounting deficit that by 1865 had quadrupled, and paper money again spewed out while several million gourdes printed in excess of the authorized run spilled into the pockets of high officials. Trouble came with the legislature — impatient elite youth, expectations out of all proportion to what any regime could deliver — and on June 3, 1863, Geffrard dissolved it, pointedly noting that although Haiti theoretically had over 200,000 qualified electors, barely 5,000 ever voted. (13) His new rubber-stamp legislature promptly voted a presidential pay raise of $50,000 a year plus $20,000 each for secret police and contingencies, while Geffrard established the importing firm Fabre Geffrard & Cie. to channel the government’s European business through his own offices. Commencing with the Guerrier Prophète attempt of 1859, the Geffrard regime was subjected to a recorded total of fifteen coups in eight years: General Léon Legros tried to storm the Gonaïves arsenal on November 6, 1861; Senator Étienne Salomon was taken and shot in Cayes on May 1, 1862, after trying to rouse the piquets at Chollette; Aimé Legros — the very man who had warned Geffrard of Soulouque’s murder plot and arranged his escape — marched on Petite Rivière in June 1863 only to be stoned down by soldiers crying “Vive Geffrard!” and shot in St. Marc on June 19; and on April 25, 1864, the Port-au-Prince elite made a clumsy attempt to seize the arsenal while Geffrard was on a military promenade in the North. In Marcelin’s acerbic phrase, Geffrard had tried to rule by conciliation, by reform, and finally by force — and had he known them, he might well have pondered the words of Edmund Burke: “Conciliation failing, force remains; force failing, nothing remains.”