Gabriel's Richmond plot answered French abolition, not Haiti

Geggus argues that the blacksmith Gabriel's conspiracy in Richmond, Virginia looks very much like a response to the abolitionism of the French Republic rather than to the Haitian Revolution. At that moment an undeclared war ran between France and the United States, and Frenchmen living locally were said to have had a hand in it. Historians routinely link the conspiracy to Saint-Domingue, but contemporary sources show no trace of the conspirators discussing it, and the evidence of the black revolution's impact on Virginian slaves is in his judgement remarkably slight. He makes the same move about the attempt launched from Saint-Domingue in 1799 to raise a slave insurrection in Jamaica: the initiative came from Paris and was organised by the French official Philippe Roume, while Toussaint Louverture secretly revealed the plan to the British because a maritime blockade would have ruined him. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus denies the standard link between Gabriel's conspiracy and the Haitian Revolution, finding no contemporary evidence for it.

Talleyrand negotiated a peace agreement with the United States at Mortefontaine, ending the undeclared naval war that his own conduct under the Directory had provoked. Girard treats the settlement as the first condition for the later invasion, since the expedition would depend almost entirely on American merchants for supplies. The obstacle was that many of those merchants openly preferred Louverture, who had protected their ships from French privateers throughout the conflict, and were reluctant to feed soldiers they had recently fought. Girard shows the problem being solved politically rather than commercially, when a new administration in Washington proved sympathetic to French colonial interests. The sequence matters for his argument that the expedition was assembled through diplomacy across three capitals rather than by French naval power, which by 1801 could barely get grain traders out of Brest.

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.

On 27 April 1800 Toussaint got the French commissioner Roume to sign an order authorising him to take possession of Spanish Santo Domingo. Bell stresses the verb. The order was extracted rather than received, part of a pattern in which Toussaint obtained French legal cover for decisions he had already made. The mechanism was the dormant Treaty of Basel, which had transferred the eastern colony to France in 1795 and had never been executed for want of troops. Acting on it gave Toussaint the whole island, closed the land route by which enslaved people were still being trafficked from the Spanish side, and removed the last territory where a rival authority could shelter. It also alarmed Paris, since a governor who could annex a neighbouring colony on his own initiative was plainly beyond correction by decree.