Writing as chancellor to King Henry Christophe, Vastey sets out why the colonial order in Saint-Domingue collapsed and why Haitians would never again accept French rule. He begins by counting the colony's people: some forty thousand whites divided between great planters and poor whites, thirty thousand free people of colour and free blacks graded by shade, and three hundred thousand enslaved people themselves split between creoles and Africans and between household servants and field hands. Every rank despised the one below it, and that pride is what he says the whole system rested on. Ogé's refusal to arm the enslaved alongside free men of colour cost him his life and delayed the rising. The civil wars that followed independence he lays at the door of French agents and of Pétion, whom he charges with treason. Appendices print diplomatic correspondence, royal proclamations, school returns and trade figures to carry the case.