Jamaica hangs Sasportas three days before his rising was to begin

Sasportas was taken from his cell, marched in irons around the parade square at Kingston wearing placards naming him a spy in English and in French, and hanged from a very tall scaffold under a sentence requiring the whole business be as public and shaming as possible. A military court had convicted him on the sixteenth and seventeenth of December after Dubuisson turned and blamed him. His own defence, that he was a Spanish national in town to buy a boat, could not survive evidence the court held secretly from Louverture. Girard notes what the calendar was supposed to hold instead. Sasportas was to poison the governor's coffee on 26 December, at the height of the Christmas holiday when the island was least governable, proclaim emancipation, and hold on until a French fleet arrived on 6 January. Balcarres declared martial law and the expedition was abandoned. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard holds that Louverture personally exposed the Jamaica expedition; Haitian nineteenth-century historians thought he had sent the agents, and C. L. R. James attributed the plan to Rigaud and never mentioned Louverture's opposition.

In 1800 a new French commander reached Monte Cristi, on the Spanish side of Hispaniola, and told the field workers there that they were no longer property, that they were free and equal with the white townsmen, and that they should join the national guard. A woman from Saint-Domingue named Raimonde took him at his word and began calling herself a domestic servant. Her employer decided she had become a bad subject and arranged to sell her at Santiago, seventy miles inland. She was shut up the night before so that she could not run, then fastened to an iron bar fitted with rings and a lock and set on a mule for the journey. She was handed over for cash and tobacco. French officials intervened and she was released. Her testimony survives because she was interrogated, which makes her one of the very few people caught in this traffic whose own words were written down at the time.

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.

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.