Against his superior's advice Toussaint treats with Maitland

In August 1798, against the advice of the Directory's envoy Hedouville, Toussaint struck a separate peace with the British general Maitland, and British troops left the island over the following months. Pierrot shows the withdrawal being reported at home as doubly good news, since it ended a costly expedition and quieted opposition in Parliament, while Maitland had also secured a secret economic treaty under which goods would come to selected ports in British and American ships and be paid for in colonial produce. The mechanism of the reporting mattered more than the terms. English newspapers publicised the agreements and read them as signs of an impending split between Santo Domingo and France, a Times item of 30 October 1798 announcing that the colony was likely to become an independent black colony whose people wanted no dealings with the French government.

Thomas Jefferson twice paid for the services of an enslaved healer known as Perkins's Sam, in November 1798 and August 1799, to attend George and George Junior at Monticello during illnesses nobody could explain. Those were the only two occasions on which he paid an enslaved practitioner at all, though he regularly bought medicine from white ones. Four unusual deaths occurred in that household in these years, and Sam was very likely the practitioner in each. In January and April 1800 letters within the family discuss the same negro doctor who attended the Georges, this time in connection with an attempt to prosecute a conjuror for poisoning other enslaved people. The accused ran away before he could be arrested. A second attempt on Jefferson's properties in 1819 ended in acquittal for want of evidence. Wealthy Virginians called such practitioners in for afflictions they could not name and prosecuted them for the same power.

In 1800 Dessalines was besieging Jacmel and wanted to marry Marie-Claire Heureuse Bonheur of Leogane. She set a condition on her consent. She was to be allowed to relieve the people trapped inside the town, the children, the old and the starving. Inside Jacmel the population was queuing at Petion's headquarters for a piece of cassava and eating roadside grass, dead horses, rats and shoe leather. Dessalines agreed. Two days later a column of women and girls left Leogane with mules loaded with provisions, medicines and dressings, and halted at the barricades of stakes and packed earth. Petion, at that moment Dessalines's bitterest opponent, had been warned and accepted the offer, and the column was let through. Claire Heureuse lit fires under improvised tripods, peeled vegetables, cooked, opened the medicine cases and dressed wounds, in the white dress she wore for the rest of her life.

Starvation ended the Second Carib War. The British had worked out that destroying the hidden provision grounds would do what pursuit could not, and the survivors who came down from the mountains were described by the botanist Alexander Anderson as a spectacle of misery. Britain then decided to remove them from St Vincent altogether. They were shipped first to Balliceaux, a small island nearby, where roughly half of them died under British military supervision, probably of continued famine together with yellow fever or some similar epidemic. Nancie Gonzalez counts 4,338 deported to Balliceaux and 2,248 alive to make the onward voyage to Roatan, an island off the coast of Honduras. Years later a Guatemalan envoy, Jose Rossi y Rubi, came to Roatan to negotiate resettlement on the Central American mainland and asked one of their leaders where his loyalties lay. The man answered that he commanded in nobody's name and was a Carib subordinate to no one.