A widow from Leogane talks her way into a starving town

Marie Claire Heureuse was born at Leogane in 1758 to a family of small means, raised by an aunt who kept house for the Dominican friars, and widowed in 1795. During the siege of Jacmel in 1800 the town was ruined by hunger and disease and close to giving way. She persuaded Jean Jacques Dessalines, one of the commanders of the besieging force and a man she was meeting for the first time, to let her cross the lines and treat the wounded. Two days later a column of women and girls left Leogane on mules loaded with food, medicine and dressings. She lit the cooking fires herself, cleaned the vegetables and bandaged the wounded with the help of her friends. Some Haitian writers count her as a war nurse working long before Florence Nightingale did the same thing on a larger scale. She married Dessalines on 21 October 1801.

Toussaint's most notable acquisition during the revolution was a lease on the Manquets plantation, among the largest sugar works in the colony in the seventeen eighties and the prize possession of the comte de Noé. Management records surviving in Philadelphia show what it actually produced. Output was worth 6,519 gourdes in the first of these years and 13,349 in the second, a small return once a quarter of the crop went to the workers, who were no longer slaves, and after an outlay of 4,143 gourdes to rebuild the water mill. The manager was owed years of arrears and complained that the labourers pressed him constantly about their pay. When Toussaint was deported in June 1802 a detailed French audit found his other estates equally unproductive. The authors conclude that sugar on his own land was nowhere near prerevolutionary levels and that the long decline had already begun. Where this account departs from the standard one: Toussaint claimed the colony under his government was more prosperous than before the revolution; his own plantation accounts contradict him.

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.

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.