The consuls explain that colonies will get special laws made in Paris

The editors reproduce the consuls' proclamation to the inhabitants of the colony explaining the intention behind the article of the new French constitution providing that French colonies would be governed by special laws. The proclamation justified the provision by climate, distance and difference in habits, customs, interests, soil and production, promised that one of the new legislature's first acts would be to draft the laws meant to govern them, and urged them not to be alarmed. The editors are blunt about what this meant. It was not in the first consul's design to leave the drafting of legislation to the colony's own authorities. It was through a very liberal reading of that same French constitution that Louverture went on to have not merely laws but a constitution drafted and promulgated.

From 1801, under Toussaint Louverture, the tactic of marronnage revived in Saint Domingue. The people who had been enslaved were now legally free and were being held to compulsory labour on the large estates, producing export crops over which they had no control, and they answered as they had answered slavery. They withdrew onto land where they could grow food, and rebuilt the structures of mutual support that two centuries of African practice in the Caribbean had shaped. When the moment allowed, they rose against the state and the large proprietors. Reading Haitian history as a clean break at 1804 hides this, because the political stage changed hands while the labour question stood still. For the former slaves, control over their own economic and social life remained as unsettled after independence as before, and the machinery used to compel their work was inherited rather than dismantled.

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.

Pierrot cites a London Gazette article of December 1798 celebrating Toussaint as a man born to vindicate the claims of his species and to show that character is independent of exterior colour, and telling every liberal Briton to feel proud that this country had brought about the happy revolution. The same article called him a negro chief or king. The mechanism the article identifies is threefold. Praising the individual detached him from his troops, his struggle and his country; describing him as a chief or king moved him out of politics and into a literary register British readers already knew; and crediting Britain with the outcome erased four years of British warfare against the very revolution being celebrated. Claims that Toussaint was of royal African extraction, true or not, served the same displacement.