A paymaster carries Louverture's offer of protection to John Adams

Louverture sent his paymaster, the Cap-Francais businessman Joseph Bunel, to the United States with a friendly letter for President Adams. The offer was a trade. American merchants would return to the colony's ports and in exchange Louverture would shield their ships from French privateers operating out of the same harbours. Girard reads the mission against Louverture's domestic position rather than his foreign ambitions. Hedouville had denounced him as a rebel before leaving and had authorised Rigaud to reject his authority, so any declaration of independence would have confirmed the accusation and destroyed his standing. Buying American food and guns while continuing to look loyal to France was the only course that served him. Rigaud's southern province, spared most of the fighting and long a haven for smugglers, was well supplied with exactly what Louverture's army lacked.

Stein marks a turn from balance to compulsion. With Britain and Spain defeated and the insurgency in decline, Hedouville decided it was time to tighten the screws and issued his order on plantation policing on 24 July 1798, opening with the claim that the moment had come to take every possible measure to make the colony's agriculture flourish. Its thirty-eight articles proved far more rigorous than anything Sonthonax or Polverel had written. Farm workers had to sign contracts of at least three years with their employers under article eleven and give a year's notice to change estates under article fourteen. Anyone without employment counted as a vagabond and faced six months in prison under article twenty. Even those working needed the manager's written permission to attend a weekday market, and local military commanders were made responsible for enforcing discipline.

Roume had sent Devaux and then Sasportas to Curacao with narrow instructions: recruit privateers for the Jamaica operation and nothing else. Girard quotes the order to think only of Jamaica, and he uses it to knock down the claim by Loker and others that the pair were meant to start a slave revolt on the Dutch island. Curacao looked promising because the Netherlands was allied to France and the island held several hundred French residents and a thousand Jews, many of them Sasportas relatives on his mother's side. Their sympathies were another matter, since Jewish owners held roughly a sixth of the island's enslaved people. Devaux exceeded his brief and conspired against Governor Lauffer, who arrested both men and shipped them back to Saint-Domingue. Lauffer never published the secret instructions he seized, which is why the setback did not end the plan. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against Loker and others, Girard argues the Curacao mission was about hiring privateers and was never an attempt to raise a slave revolt there.

Speaking to the African Masonic Lodge in Boston, Prince Hall, who had fought in the war against Britain, told his brethren not to be cast down under the abuses they laboured under, because the darkest hour comes before daybreak. He asked them to remember how dark a day it had been for their African brethren six years earlier in the French West Indies, when nothing but the snap of the whip was heard from morning to evening. Jackson uses the speech to open a two century argument. Black and white Americans took opposite meanings from the same events, with white reaction running to shock, fear, surveillance and harsh law, while black Americans saw in Haiti and in the figure of Toussaint the possibilities of their race and its movement toward freedom.