Toussaint takes Santo Domingo to block a landing, not to free it

In the years after the British withdrawal, Louverture became the decisive actor in the colony and quietly undid the overseas projects of the French agents above him. Girard treats his one foreign campaign, the takeover of Spanish Santo Domingo, with the same scepticism he applies to the Jamaica affair. Louverture justified it by his commitment to ending slavery, but the enslaved population there was among the smallest in the Caribbean, and Girard concludes that the real purpose was to deny France a landing ground from which it could remove him from power. In the same years French officials were dreaming in the opposite direction. Hedouville expected the colony to become the key to the Gulf of Mexico, and Laveaux imagined it as an immense barracks of republican soldiers that would alarm the United States and outstrip it in wealth. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard denies that the annexation of Santo Domingo was driven by antislavery, reading it as insurance against a French expedition.

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.

News of the French takeover of the Dutch Republic and the creation of the Batavian Republic had already been part of Tula's argument the previous year. In 1796 it worked its way through the colonial administration. The ancien régime governor Johannes de Veer withdrew and was replaced by a politically colourless local bureaucrat, Jan Jacob Beaujon, who was in turn replaced by an apparently more outspoken pro-French Patriot, Johann Rudolf Lauffer, all within the same year. Oostindie stresses that this reshuffle reflected dynamics inside the white elite, between Orangists and Patriots but also within Patriot circles, over questions that came down to trade and economic interest. Sections of the free coloured population had their own stake in the 1796 power games, mainly better representation in local politics, and there is evidence of open and sometimes violent free coloured protest, but no sign of organised cross-colour action aiming at radical change.

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.