Rigaud marches on the Goaves and the war of the south begins

Bell dates the opening of the civil war between Toussaint and Rigaud to 15 June 1799, when Rigaud was already marching in force toward Petit Goave and Grand Goave. The mechanism was a transfer of posts. The commissioner Roume had shortly before moved the two towns from Rigaud's command into Toussaint's, and Rigaud answered by taking them back. Bell traces how a dispute over garrisons became a war fought and remembered along colour lines, hardened by the Villatte affair three years earlier and by Hedouville's parting encouragement to the southern command. The outcome consolidated Toussaint's control of the whole French colony and sent Rigaud, Petion and Villatte into exile in France, from where they would return in 1802 aboard the fleet that carried Leclerc's expedition. Bell treats the war as the moment when the revolution's internal fault line hardened into memory.

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.

Girard narrates the arrest from an eyewitness account. Officers took both men at a Kingston inn, stripped them and slit open their clothing in search of concealed papers, searched their lodgings, and moved them under guard first to a Kingston cell and then to the seat of government at Spanish Town for interrogation by the governor's council. It was Sasportas's third detention in six months, after the capture of his ship by a British cruiser in the spring and his deportation from Curacao in the autumn, and Girard suggests he expected to talk his way out again. He refused to confess. A Kingston Jew who had known him since childhood then confirmed that he had been in contact with the Blue Mountain Maroons, which broke the story he was trying to hold. Balcarres had moved only after Louverture's warnings reached him.

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.