A secretary of state dines with a black government's envoy

Pickering had written two days earlier asking that his respects be presented to Bunel with an invitation to dine on the Wednesday at half past three with a few select friends. Johnson builds the article on that note, which earlier scholarship had not used. The secretary and his guests sat down with a man who told them that a black former slave leading a revolution was offering protection to American interests in exchange for trade and diplomatic support. The guests probably included the congressmen Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts and Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina, both thirty three, who had pushed the Alien and Sedition Acts through that summer and who walked the three blocks north from Congress Hall after the day's session. Otis had spent that morning securing jurisdiction over the coming legislation on France and Saint-Domingue. Where this account departs from the standard one: Johnson corrects the standard picture of this meeting by removing Adams from the table and by showing that the envoy was a white Frenchman, not a man of African descent.

During the years Louverture governed Saint-Domingue, Bonaparte instructed him to have regimental flags inscribed with a formula crediting the French people alone with recognising the freedom and equal rights of black soldiers. Girard records that Louverture never carried the order out. The reasoning he attributes to Louverture is precise and cynical. If the troops were told in stitched letters that their liberty came from Paris, they would look to Paris rather than to their own commander, and they would also stop worrying about what France might do next. Leaving the flags blank kept the black majority uncertain about French intentions, and that uncertainty was politically useful to him. The episode supports Girard's larger claim that the tricolor had become the emblem of the one European power that had abolished slavery, which is why the rebels of 1802 and 1803 built their own banners out of it rather than out of British, Spanish or American models.

Pierrot cites a London Gazette article of December 1798 celebrating Toussaint as a man born to vindicate the claims of his species and to show that character is independent of exterior colour, and telling every liberal Briton to feel proud that this country had brought about the happy revolution. The same article called him a negro chief or king. The mechanism the article identifies is threefold. Praising the individual detached him from his troops, his struggle and his country; describing him as a chief or king moved him out of politics and into a literary register British readers already knew; and crediting Britain with the outcome erased four years of British warfare against the very revolution being celebrated. Claims that Toussaint was of royal African extraction, true or not, served the same displacement.

On this day the French adjutant general Devaux told the agent Philippe Roume that a young merchant had submitted a proposal for invading Jamaica. Girard calls it the turning point. Earlier schemes had been ministerial daydreams; Sasportas supplied timing, contacts and a method. His innovation was to insist that the expedition should not merely land soldiers from Saint-Domingue but should raise Jamaica's own enslaved population, arguing that the army had to be recruited inside enemy territory. He wrote of a soul roused by liberty and of avenging friends the British had destroyed, and he reached for scriptural vocabulary in doing so. Roume, a white Creole from Grenada who had once defended slavery, recoiled at first from a proposal that risked a bloodbath among white planters, then met Sasportas in person and was won over. By May he was drafting the operation along Sasportas's lines. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus attributes the 1799 Jamaica scheme to French policy and shows Louverture actively sabotaging it, against accounts that treat it as Haitian subversion.