With the foreign enemy gone, the two victors turn on each other

By 1798 Louverture controlled everything except the long southern peninsula, which was the stronghold of the free men of colour under Andre Rigaud, a former goldsmith and the freeborn son of a white officer. With no outside enemy left to hold them together, the two men fell into a contest for power. The War of the South began in July 1799 and lasted a year, costing thousands of lives. Geggus describes it as a regional rivalry sharpened by class and ethnic tension, and its outcome as the crushing of the anciens libres of the south by a former slave, along with those in his own army who turned against him. Hundreds fled to France. Louverture had already engineered the departure of Governor Laveaux, been made deputy governor in April 1796 and commander in chief in 1797, and deported both Sonthonax and his successor on invented charges.

In 1800 a new French commander reached Monte Cristi, on the Spanish side of Hispaniola, and told the field workers there that they were no longer property, that they were free and equal with the white townsmen, and that they should join the national guard. A woman from Saint-Domingue named Raimonde took him at his word and began calling herself a domestic servant. Her employer decided she had become a bad subject and arranged to sell her at Santiago, seventy miles inland. She was shut up the night before so that she could not run, then fastened to an iron bar fitted with rings and a lock and set on a mule for the journey. She was handed over for cash and tobacco. French officials intervened and she was released. Her testimony survives because she was interrogated, which makes her one of the very few people caught in this traffic whose own words were written down at the time.

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.