A young merchant hands France a workable plan to raise Jamaica

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.

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.

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.

On 2 January 1800 Doctor Felix Pascalis was elected a member of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the oldest body of its kind in the world and the most active in the United States. His certificate was signed by James Pemberton. On 14 October of the same year the Gazette of the United States carried an advertisement over his name headed Stop Thief. It offered thirty dollars for the capture of an indented mulatto boy of seventeen, engaged under the name Joseph Brown, who had left the doctor's house on South Street with more than a hundred dollars, and ten dollars more if the young villain could be brought to condign punishment. The notice ran one day after the disappearance. Pascalis never owned a slave and thought slavery a bad thing. He owned a man's indenture, which in Pennsylvania could be bought and sold and left the person under it with almost no protection at law.