No trial transcript survives. The case is known only through accounts by foreign observers who had arrived already persuaded of the charge, above all Spenser St John, who published his twenty years afterwards and who recorded that the confessions had been beaten out of the accused. The court proceeded in French before Creole-speaking defendants, and the Haitian government, seeking diplomatic recognition, had an interest in a public conviction watched by European envoys. No scholar holds a reconstruction of the events, because there is nothing to reconstruct one from.
What would resolve this Recovery of Haitian judicial or police records for 1864, whether in Port-au-Prince or in the French, British and American consular archives that received contemporary reports, together with a critical edition of the surviving foreign accounts collated against one another rather than read singly.
OpenCaribbean archival history and the history of criminal justice, with Haitian Creole and nineteenth-century French palaeography.Spenser St John, Hayti, or the Black Republic