1875, June–October 4: (The Siege of the American Legation and Boisrond’s Escape): For five months, while Domingue and Rameau presided over a carnival of tria…

1875, June–October 4: (The Siege of the American Legation and Boisrond’s Escape): For five months, while Domingue and Rameau presided over a carnival of trials, executions, and banishments, the siege of the U.S. legation went on, with soldiers ringing the compound, harassing visitors, and — on special orders — keeping up a noisy cry every night from early evening until morning expressly to annoy Bassett and his household. Three weeks later, nerves frayed and patience exhausted, Bassett felt compelled to confess that after years of good-faith effort to carry out the considerate policy of his government, he was forced to admit that his colleagues often had reason in dealing sharply with the unreasonable, conceited, and utterly hollow-hearted men who somehow always managed to get control of the government. Only after the Haitian minister in Washington was told that a U.S. warship was on its way did Domingue relent, and on October 4, 1875, Bassett was permitted to embark Boisrond and his brother aboard an American brigantine — the refugees, in a somewhat disagreeable French custom, embraced the minister and then permitted him to retire. The episode laid bare the fundamental asymmetry of sovereignty in the hemisphere: Haiti’s internal political prisoners could only be extracted through the threatened deployment of American naval power, confirming that the Black republic’s formal independence functioned within a neocolonial architecture where the warship remained the ultimate arbiter of rights.