A week after the dinner the bill to reopen the trade goes to the House

Merely a week after the meeting at Pickering's home, Otis introduced into the House of Representatives the proposal that would let the president reopen commerce with parts of the French empire. When the debate began in earnest later that month Albert Gallatin led the opposition, telling the chamber that the wild tigers of Saint-Domingue had laid the island waste in the blood of men, and sharpening the attack by pointing out that the black leader's white emissary was married to a black woman. Johnson uses the sequence to argue that the dinner was not a courtesy but one part of a legislative and diplomatic strategy, and reads the Federalist practice of settling positions at private dinners and caucuses as the ordinary machinery of the capital at the end of 1798.

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.