A new member of the abolition society advertises for a runaway

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.

Between 1799 and 1800 the general Andre Rigaud, backed by the mulatto officers and proprietors of the southern peninsula, fought Toussaint Louverture, who by then governed the rest of the colony in fact. French agents on the ground worked both sides in the interest of the metropolis. The fighting ended with Rigaud in exile in France. The episode became the founding text for a way of reading Haitian politics in which every alliance and every betrayal is explained by the skin of the man who made it. The actual line-ups were untidy. Toussaint suppressed maroon settlement and the radicalism of large sections of the black field population with the help of powerful mulattoes and whites. His administration protected large estates, kept manufacturing on the plantation model and tied cultivators to the land by military coercion. In 1803 Alexandre Petion, who had come back from France in Leclerc's army, worked out the strategy of the independence war with Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

During the years Louverture governed Saint-Domingue, Bonaparte instructed him to have regimental flags inscribed with a formula crediting the French people alone with recognising the freedom and equal rights of black soldiers. Girard records that Louverture never carried the order out. The reasoning he attributes to Louverture is precise and cynical. If the troops were told in stitched letters that their liberty came from Paris, they would look to Paris rather than to their own commander, and they would also stop worrying about what France might do next. Leaving the flags blank kept the black majority uncertain about French intentions, and that uncertainty was politically useful to him. The episode supports Girard's larger claim that the tricolor had become the emblem of the one European power that had abolished slavery, which is why the rebels of 1802 and 1803 built their own banners out of it rather than out of British, Spanish or American models.

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.