Louverture writes to the British and kills the invasion of Jamaica

The French agent Philippe Roume prepared a detailed scheme to take Jamaica. Agents would provoke a rising among the enslaved population and the poor Irish, diversionary attacks would be launched as far away as Curacao, and in the confusion the French would seize American merchant ships and land four thousand men, destroying British commerce. Girard reports that the plan was weeks from execution when Louverture, who was formally cooperating with Roume, wrote to the British commander in Jamaica on 8 October 1799 and gave it away. A French agent on the island was arrested and hanged and French troops were intercepted at sea. Girard finds the motive in Louverture's domestic position. Sending his army abroad would have exposed him to his rival Rigaud, while ending attacks on Britain and the United States secured the imports of food and weapons he could not do without. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard's Louverture works against the export of emancipation, a portrait he sets explicitly against writers who treat him as a lifelong champion of universal freedom.

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.

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.