Basel ends the war, exiles the Black generals and sells Santo Domingo

Yingling treats the Treaty of Basel of 1795 as an unexpected rupture whose costs fell on people who had no part in making it. Spain's hostilities ended at a stroke, the generals of the Black Auxiliaries were exiled, and Santo Domingo was ceded to France. An outward-looking Spanish mission of conquest and evangelisation converted overnight into a defensive effort to protect Dominican territory and Iberian belief. The colony then stayed under weakened Spanish administration for six years while the French cession lagged. When French envoys did arrive, including a racially mixed delegation, they failed in an attempt to abolish Dominican slavery, and they invited Dominicans to join a new revolutionary family, even asking the archbishop of Santo Domingo to become bishop of Ayti. Yingling shows Dominican elites hardening at this point into an association of Blackness with heresy and duplicity. Corroborated by 3 works in the library.

The colonial jurist Moreau de Saint-Mery set out a scale of eleven colour classes for Saint-Domingue. Pure white and pure black each stood at one hundred and twenty eight parts. The sacatra carried sixteen white parts, the griffe thirty two, the marabou forty eight, the mulatto sixty four, the quarteron ninety six, the metif one hundred and twelve, the mameluc one hundred and twenty, the quarteronne one hundred and twenty four, the sang mele one hundred and twenty six. Anyone with fewer than eight white parts was a negro. The scale ran one way only. Any recorded black ancestry kept a person out of the white category permanently. Moreau also counted how many parental combinations could produce each rank, twenty for the quarteron, twelve for the mulatto, none at all for the two extremes. He observed that children came out in places his arithmetic had not predicted, and he observed in passing that the eye of prejudice did the sorting.

Beaten in the colony and in Europe, Spain left the war in 1795 and handed its side of the island to France. Thousands of Spanish colonists moved to Cuba and Venezuela. Around eight hundred of the black auxiliaries and their families went into pensioned exile scattered across Central America, Florida and Cadiz, which removed the original leadership of the 1791 rising from the island permanently. The British held parts of the west and south until September 1798. They put twenty seven thousand soldiers into the colony, six times what Spain had committed, and they too made heavy use of black soldiers recruited on the plantations. Geggus notes the reversal built into the intervention. Foreign armies came to preserve the plantation regime and instead destroyed property in the fighting and pulled thousands of men out of agriculture into uniform on both sides of the line.

Naval war with Britain had destroyed the French merchant fleet, leaving Saint-Domingue dependent on American shipping, so when Congress embargoed French colonies in retaliation for privateering the colony's export economy stopped. Louverture wrote to Adams expressing surprise and sadness that American vessels had abandoned his ports, and sent Joseph Bunel to carry the letter and argue the case. Girard notes that Louverture staffed his civil administration almost entirely with white secretaries, priests, merchants and clerks, since Black and mixed-race men dominated the army, and that sending a white envoy to a slaveholding republic was ordinary politics rather than an anomaly. Bunel met Secretary of State Pickering and a congressional delegation from South Carolina, then dined with Adams. Pickering, describing the mission in his correspondence, identified Louverture as the Black commander in chief and called Bunel merely a messenger, saying nothing of his colour.