Two ports open and Louverture agrees never to build a navy

The convention opened Cap-Francais and Port-Republicain to foreign trade. In return Louverture undertook not to attack British colonies or the United States and accepted a long list of clauses restricting his ability to build a navy. Girard argues the bargain suited him for reasons entirely his own. He was moving toward war with Rigaud and was happy to promise abroad what he had no capacity to attempt anyway, provided American merchants came back with food and weapons. By the time trade resumed that summer he had what his army needed and had secured British acquiescence without an open break with France. The naval clauses would prove expensive within months, when the Royal Navy seized a flotilla he had armed to carry troops to the southern coast and an admiralty court in Jamaica condemned the ships.

In 1801 Dessalines was inspector general of cultivation for the western department. Told that a vodou ceremony was under way somewhere in the plain of Cul de Sac, he went there at the head of a battalion of the eighth demi brigade and put fifty of those present to the sword. That was the first official repression of belief by the men who were founding the state, and it set a pattern that outlasted them. The charter made Catholicism the religion of the country and gave it the protection of the government. The penal code defined an offence of superstition, and the secular arm took the authority to punish anything that touched the orthodoxy of the official cult. Driven out of the law, the older religion adapted. Worshippers matched their deities to the saints of the church, required the sacraments of both cults from their followers, and folded scapulars, novenas, candles and requiem masses into the ritual instructions of the hougan.

Roume had sent Devaux and then Sasportas to Curacao with narrow instructions: recruit privateers for the Jamaica operation and nothing else. Girard quotes the order to think only of Jamaica, and he uses it to knock down the claim by Loker and others that the pair were meant to start a slave revolt on the Dutch island. Curacao looked promising because the Netherlands was allied to France and the island held several hundred French residents and a thousand Jews, many of them Sasportas relatives on his mother's side. Their sympathies were another matter, since Jewish owners held roughly a sixth of the island's enslaved people. Devaux exceeded his brief and conspired against Governor Lauffer, who arrested both men and shipped them back to Saint-Domingue. Lauffer never published the secret instructions he seized, which is why the setback did not end the plan. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against Loker and others, Girard argues the Curacao mission was about hiring privateers and was never an attempt to raise a slave revolt there.

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.