American ships go back into Saint-Domingue's ports

The renewal of American commerce with Saint-Domingue took effect on this date, the outcome of the legislative revision begun in January and of the diplomacy that ran alongside it, including Pickering's letter to Louverture in March and the arrival of Edward Stevens as the American representative at Cap-Francais. Johnson's conclusion is that from 1798 to 1801 the United States conducted an active two way foreign policy with the colony rather than merely tolerating trade with its ports, and that this support let the revolutionaries move toward nationhood in a way that neither Bonaparte's army nor later isolation could reverse. The relationship ended with Adams's electoral defeat, which halted eighteenth century American diplomacy toward the island and left the colony standing on the threshold of independence without its northern partner.

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.

Roume had sent Devaux and then Sasportas to Curacao with narrow instructions: recruit privateers for the Jamaica operation and nothing else. Girard quotes the order to think only of Jamaica, and he uses it to knock down the claim by Loker and others that the pair were meant to start a slave revolt on the Dutch island. Curacao looked promising because the Netherlands was allied to France and the island held several hundred French residents and a thousand Jews, many of them Sasportas relatives on his mother's side. Their sympathies were another matter, since Jewish owners held roughly a sixth of the island's enslaved people. Devaux exceeded his brief and conspired against Governor Lauffer, who arrested both men and shipped them back to Saint-Domingue. Lauffer never published the secret instructions he seized, which is why the setback did not end the plan. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against Loker and others, Girard argues the Curacao mission was about hiring privateers and was never an attempt to raise a slave revolt there.

Jeanne Mathusine Droibillan Volunbrun had left Saint Domingue five years earlier for New York. In August 1801 she prepared to move the people she held to Norfolk, sell them there and use the money to return to the island, where she still had a plantation. Black Saint Domingans living in New York gathered outside her house, and the police seized a number of them. The Manumission Society had writs served on her, resting the claim on the French decree of 5 February 1794 that had abolished slavery in all French territory; she posted bond of 5,390 dollars, and on 14 August the society's lawyers obtained the freedom of everyone she held. The men who had gathered waited in jail until October because the court sat quarterly. All the defendants in the resulting case were black and many were Haitian. They were given sixty days in the county prison.