Why did Toussaint Louverture, master of the colony by 1797 and victor over Rigaud by 1800, keep swearing loyalty to France instead of declaring independence? Thomas answers by looking outward. The 1798 agreement with General Maitland, later extended to the United States through Joseph Bunel's mission, gave Louverture protection from privateers, an influx of British and American shipping, better prices at both ends of the trade, and a promise from both powers not to meddle in the colony's form of government. American naval help then squeezed Rigaud's supply lines at Jacmel. All of that depended on Washington's tolerance, which rested in turn on southern planters believing the colony posed no threat to slavery. A formal declaration would have provoked a French expedition and cost him the American connection, so Thomas reads the professions of loyalty as a deliberate purchase of time for a state not yet ready to stand alone.