Toussaint refuses to sew Bonaparte's promise onto his flags

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.

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.

The French forces fighting alongside the Caribs on St Vincent agreed to capitulate in June 1796, a little over a year after the war began. The Caribs would not sign. They stayed in the mountains and went on attacking British troops from them, living on hidden provision grounds of plantains and yams and on roots and leaves when those ran out. One British soldier wrote to his father that they were still in the field and engaged in a butchering war with people who neither gave nor received quarter. Leadership had passed to the son of Joseph Chatoyer, the elder Chatoyer having been killed in the first days of the fighting. The younger man told British negotiators that it was no disgrace for Caribs to surrender to a great nation, since the subjects of France and even of England must submit when resistance is no longer possible. On the appointed day a few hundred appeared out of more than four thousand.

Manigat explains the pedagogy behind the kingdom's schools. Joseph Lancaster, a British educator who lived from 1778 to 1838, introduced in England in 1798 a system of popular education promoted by a foundation first called the Royal Lancasterian Institution and later the British and Foreign School Society, whose aim was to make education universal and by which a single master could comfortably run a school of a thousand pupils through eight graded classes. Lancaster published his views in 1803 in a widely noticed book, and a manual followed. Two principles gave the method its originality: all classes ran simultaneously in one large hall, with the first learning letters at the master's desk, classes two to seven working on slates and class eight allowed pen and ink; and the ablest pupils were trained as monitors to teach rows of their fellows, multiplying instructors from within.