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On 23 February 1807, Grenville, the prime minister who with Wilberforce had backed abolition in Pitt’s garden, ensured that the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was passed in the Commons by 283 votes to 16. Britain was not the first: Denmark had abolished the trade four years earlier at the second attempt. But Britain had the power to impose abolition, sending warships, soon upgraded to the West Africa Squadron based at Freetown, that seized 1,600 slave ships, freeing 150,000 slaves. Haiti was the only country that had so far abolished slavery itself. Wilberforce and Clarkson were soon in contact with Christophe.^*

On 26 March 1811, Christophe was crowned King Henry I (premier monarque couronné du Nouveau-Monde as well as defender of the faith) by a white priest, alongside his queen Marie Louise,^* whose free father had owned the Crown tavern where they had met. They were enthroned on a platform seventy feet high under a scarlet canopy in a church shrouded with sky-blue silk. At the celebrations afterwards, King Henry toasted ‘my dear brother George III – invincible obstacle to the unbridled ambition of Napoleon’, though, like the emperor, he created a Christophean aristocracy led by four princes and eight dukes: his commander-in-chief became the duc de Marmelade and he co-opted Emperor Jacques’s nephews as barons and equerries. Yet he also promoted intellectuals of the Haitian Enlightenment. The writer Julien Prévost became foreign minister and comte de Limonade, and his ideologist was the historian Valentin de Vastey, now a baron.

The king and queen ordered royal carriages and regalia in London – engraved ‘Liberty, Equality and Henry’, their crest declaring ‘Reborn from the ashes’, their court revelling in its gold braid and spectacular uniforms. The queen led her own unit of Royal Amazons who paraded at annual fetes, celebrating with lightshows and pyramids, creole songs, kalinda and samba dancing.

Autocratic and short-tempered, the king was irrepressibly energetic, the first great black statesman of modern times, dreaming of creating an orderly rich and educated Haiti that would show whites that a black kingdom could equal or overtake them. He faced the constant threat of internal rivals and French invasion, enforcing his power with a Royal Corps of Dahomey – 4,000 troops imported from west Africa – while completing Emperor Jacques’s fortress, Citadelle La Ferrière, where thousands of labourers reportedly perished. His Sans-Souci Palace in Milot, featuring marble floors cooled by water from mountain springs, was just one of his fifteen chateaux, ‘erected by the descendants of Africans’, wrote baron de Vastey, ‘to show we have not lost the architectural taste and genius of our ancestors who covered Ethiopia, Egypt, Carthage and old Spain with their superb monuments’.

Son of a French slave owner and a free black woman, Vastey, a cousin of Bonaparte’s general Dumas, reacted against Enlightened apologies for slavery and racism, placing the stories of Haitian cruelty in context by exposing France’s ‘unheard-of crimes that made nature shudder’, in works that were widely read in Europe and America – the first intellectual of colour to win a world readership, the first to write black history. Wary of a new French invasion and keen to unite Haiti, King Henry raided Pétion’s rival state and created his own navy under a British admiral. He was an Anglophile who consulted Clarkson on his vision of teaching Haitians English literature and language. Clarkson sent English teachers to the king, who in turn supported Clarkson’s campaign to abolish slavery altogether.

Grenville’s Act was far from the end of the slave trade. Some 700,000 people remained enslaved on British plantations, 300,000 in Jamaica. Brazil, Cuba and the French colonies still demanded more slaves, as new technical developments made them even more important in the USA.

Jefferson had survived the revelations about his family with Sally Hemings to be re-elected president in 1804.^* In 1807, a month after Grenville’s Act, he signed an Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, but he remained uncertain about how to abolish slavery itself and suspicious about real liberation, refusing to recognize Haiti and allowing slavery to be extended into the Louisiana Purchase.