Jacmel falls after siege guns are dragged over the mountains

Unable to storm Jacmel, Toussaint set out to starve it, and Healy identifies the decisive step as diplomatic. To isolate the town and the whole southern department from the sea he wrote to President Adams asking for American help, a request supported by the United States consul general in the colony. With the harbour blocked, famine was added to the defenders' troubles, and Toussaint had siege guns hauled across the mountain barrier so that constant bombardment could be added to starvation and disease. Cavalry horses were eaten, then rats and lizards became luxuries. When Petion, one of Rigaud's ablest officers, judged defence impossible and cut his way out rather than surrender, Toussaint's army came through the gates. Healy says he knew at that point he was at the height of his military power.

Dupuy offers two arguments against the view that the indemnity was the main reason Haiti could not develop its economy. The first is that the dominant classes were unable to turn the peasantry into a proletariat and so revive the sugar plantations that had produced the colony's wealth. Failing that, they had to accommodate a class structure made up mostly of landowning peasants, tenant farmers and sharecroppers producing the coffee, cotton, indigo, cacao and lumber Haiti exported. The landed bourgeoisie therefore drew its wealth from rents extracted from tenants and sharecroppers, from buying and selling the farmers' cash crops on the world market, and from importing and reselling goods at home. Haiti stayed fully integrated into the capitalist world economy all the same, because the surplus value contained in what it produced entered the circuits of industrial and financial capital abroad. Where this account departs from the standard one: Denies that the indemnity was a major cause of nineteenth-century Haitian underdevelopment, pointing instead to the ruling class's failure to proletarianise the peasantry.

Girard narrates the arrest from an eyewitness account. Officers took both men at a Kingston inn, stripped them and slit open their clothing in search of concealed papers, searched their lodgings, and moved them under guard first to a Kingston cell and then to the seat of government at Spanish Town for interrogation by the governor's council. It was Sasportas's third detention in six months, after the capture of his ship by a British cruiser in the spring and his deportation from Curacao in the autumn, and Girard suggests he expected to talk his way out again. He refused to confess. A Kingston Jew who had known him since childhood then confirmed that he had been in contact with the Blue Mountain Maroons, which broke the story he was trying to hold. Balcarres had moved only after Louverture's warnings reached him.

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.