Guadeloupe troops besiege Willemstad and Lauffer calls in Britain

Curaçao was visited and then partly occupied by predominantly black troops from revolutionary France's colony of Guadeloupe. Oostindie reports widespread support among the enslaved but not among free blacks and people of colour, and documents the participation of French, Haitian and Guadeloupean commanders including Bresseau and the future Haitian president Alexandre Pétion, alongside members of the local criollo elite such as Luis Brión, later admiral under Bolívar. At the height of the affair in early September about twelve hundred French Caribbean troops were besieging Willemstad, many rural slaves had joined on a promise of liberty and equality, and slaves in the town refused to work. Governor Lauffer, unable to defeat them and unwilling to admit black troops, requested British help from the frigate Nereide; two North American frigates joined within days. On 23 September the French colonial troops evacuated hastily, abandoning prisoners. Where this account departs from the standard one: Oostindie and Han Jordaan reject the heroic reading advanced by Roberto Palacios, in which Jean Baptiste Tierce Cadet led a genuine Jacobin revolution for racial equality and abolition on Curaçao, and argue instead that the idea of a region-wide conspiracy starting on the island was most likely fabricated by Governor Lauffer for personal and political reasons.

From 1801, under Toussaint Louverture, the tactic of marronnage revived in Saint Domingue. The people who had been enslaved were now legally free and were being held to compulsory labour on the large estates, producing export crops over which they had no control, and they answered as they had answered slavery. They withdrew onto land where they could grow food, and rebuilt the structures of mutual support that two centuries of African practice in the Caribbean had shaped. When the moment allowed, they rose against the state and the large proprietors. Reading Haitian history as a clean break at 1804 hides this, because the political stage changed hands while the labour question stood still. For the former slaves, control over their own economic and social life remained as unsettled after independence as before, and the machinery used to compel their work was inherited rather than dismantled.

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.

Jeanne Mathusine Droibillan Volunbrun had left Saint Domingue five years earlier for New York. In August 1801 she prepared to move the people she held to Norfolk, sell them there and use the money to return to the island, where she still had a plantation. Black Saint Domingans living in New York gathered outside her house, and the police seized a number of them. The Manumission Society had writs served on her, resting the claim on the French decree of 5 February 1794 that had abolished slavery in all French territory; she posted bond of 5,390 dollars, and on 14 August the society's lawyers obtained the freedom of everyone she held. The men who had gathered waited in jail until October because the court sat quarterly. All the defendants in the resulting case were black and many were Haitian. They were given sixty days in the county prison.