Louverture trades non-interference for the reopening of his ports

Girard puts a precise instrument at the centre of Louverture's behaviour for the rest of the year. In a secret convention agreed with the British commander Maitland, and in matching arrangements with the United States, Louverture undertook that nothing would be attempted against the internal arrangements of the other side's territories. In return the Anglo-Americans lifted their embargo, which let him begin repairing a ruined colonial economy. The clause was aimed squarely at exactly the sort of operation Roume and Sasportas were then designing. Within weeks his quarrel with the mixed-race general Rigaud hardened into open civil war, which gave him a second reason to keep his soldiers at home. Girard's reading is that Louverture publicly went along with the Jamaica plan while privately working to kill it, a posture the American consul described as encouragement offered precisely so that the thing would never happen. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

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.

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.

Curaçao was visited and then partly occupied by predominantly black troops from revolutionary France's colony of Guadeloupe. Oostindie reports widespread support among the enslaved but not among free blacks and people of colour, and documents the participation of French, Haitian and Guadeloupean commanders including Bresseau and the future Haitian president Alexandre Pétion, alongside members of the local criollo elite such as Luis Brión, later admiral under Bolívar. At the height of the affair in early September about twelve hundred French Caribbean troops were besieging Willemstad, many rural slaves had joined on a promise of liberty and equality, and slaves in the town refused to work. Governor Lauffer, unable to defeat them and unwilling to admit black troops, requested British help from the frigate Nereide; two North American frigates joined within days. On 23 September the French colonial troops evacuated hastily, abandoning prisoners. Where this account departs from the standard one: Oostindie and Han Jordaan reject the heroic reading advanced by Roberto Palacios, in which Jean Baptiste Tierce Cadet led a genuine Jacobin revolution for racial equality and abolition on Curaçao, and argue instead that the idea of a region-wide conspiracy starting on the island was most likely fabricated by Governor Lauffer for personal and political reasons.