Louverture's generals become landlords of the estates they policed

On the advice of Idlinger, a white colonist made director general of estates, the government leased confiscated properties to military officers, who became responsible for running them. The practice generalised once the revolutionary army held the whole colony. Louverture himself acquired or leased many plantations, mostly coffee, and built a considerable fortune after becoming governor general. Dessalines acquired thirty-two. Moise leased several farms and sublet them. The law required leases to be registered and the owner and the state to be paid, but many officers simply took the best estates without adjudication or payment. Returning owners had to prove they were not emigres to officials who often controlled the very properties being claimed, and even successful claimants had to reimburse tenants for animals, buildings, equipment and improvements, which ruined planters could not do.

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.

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.

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.