Toussaint tips off the British and a French agent hangs in Jamaica

In 1799 the French agent Roume drew up a plan to land part of Louverture's army in Jamaica, raise the enslaved population there, march on Kingston and unseat the British governor, which would have cost France little and ruined British commerce. Louverture agreed in public and privately warned the British. Their authorities arrested the French agent on the island, a man named Sasportas, and executed him, while Roume spent months in prison before being shipped to France. Girard's judgement is blunt, that Louverture sacrificed the freedom of Jamaicans to his own power base, and that Jamaican slaves stayed in bondage until 1834 as a result. He connects this with the secret treaties Louverture signed the same year with Britain and the United States, both then at war with France, which opened his ports and closed them to French privateers. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard holds Louverture personally responsible for keeping Jamaica enslaved until 1834 by betraying the planned expedition.

Anticipating an independent Saint-Domingue, Pickering consulted Alexander Hamilton on a scheme of government and revenue for a people five years out of slavery. He wanted Louverture and his commanders to settle on a workable plan for administering the island and for the succession to the chief command, something that would guarantee the means of maintaining an army and a government. He was explicit that this could not be done officially and that the American representative arriving at Cap-Francais would know how to use it. Hamilton replied quickly with a sketch of a military style constitution. Johnson notes that the initiative was Pickering's own, and sets it beside Rufus King telling the British foreign minister that he wished to see two or three republics of former slaves in Latin America, and Adams privately calling independence the most dangerous outcome for the United States.

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.

By early 1804 Davenport had sold the figures to new proprietors who set up in New York. The collection grew to seventy or eighty pieces, many carried over from the previous year, but Louverture is absent from the list and near his old position there is now a scene from Othello. White concludes that the figure was converted. The alteration is legible because wax artists had no aversion to gore, staging the execution of Louis the sixteenth with spouting fake blood, the killing of Marat, and a general dying under tomahawks. Louverture had been shown without any violent scene because he was attached to no single atrocity, unlike Dessalines. Her reading is that a hyperrealistic likeness of a black man governing was harder to display in a slaveholding society than a licensed Shakespearean murder, and that the change came in the very year independence was declared. Where this account departs from the standard one: White locates the silencing of the revolution in objects as well as texts, arguing visual culture was even more restrictive than the written record.