A British warship brings an Anglo-American deal to Cap-Francais

An arrangement with the American consul Edward Stevens was worthless while the Royal Navy dominated the sea lanes, so Louverture also needed British consent. Girard describes the appearance of HMS Camilla at Cap-Francais as a piece of luck, since Maitland was aboard and empowered to negotiate on behalf of the United States as well as Britain. Maitland had left England in January and stopped in America to agree a joint line. By 20 April he and Pickering had settled on provisions for the security of both nations' commerce and the tranquillity of the southern states and the British West Indies. Trade would resume as Washington wanted, but it would be confined to one or two ports and to vessels carrying passports naming ship and cargo, so that no fleet could be assembled against Jamaica.

In 1801 Dessalines was inspector general of cultivation for the western department. Told that a vodou ceremony was under way somewhere in the plain of Cul de Sac, he went there at the head of a battalion of the eighth demi brigade and put fifty of those present to the sword. That was the first official repression of belief by the men who were founding the state, and it set a pattern that outlasted them. The charter made Catholicism the religion of the country and gave it the protection of the government. The penal code defined an offence of superstition, and the secular arm took the authority to punish anything that touched the orthodoxy of the official cult. Driven out of the law, the older religion adapted. Worshippers matched their deities to the saints of the church, required the sacraments of both cults from their followers, and folded scapulars, novenas, candles and requiem masses into the ritual instructions of the hougan.

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 27 April 1800 Toussaint got the French commissioner Roume to sign an order authorising him to take possession of Spanish Santo Domingo. Bell stresses the verb. The order was extracted rather than received, part of a pattern in which Toussaint obtained French legal cover for decisions he had already made. The mechanism was the dormant Treaty of Basel, which had transferred the eastern colony to France in 1795 and had never been executed for want of troops. Acting on it gave Toussaint the whole island, closed the land route by which enslaved people were still being trafficked from the Spanish side, and removed the last territory where a rival authority could shelter. It also alarmed Paris, since a governor who could annex a neighbouring colony on his own initiative was plainly beyond correction by decree.