Officers seizing abandoned estates become a Black owning class

Once Louverture and his generals controlled the colony, they took over the plantations abandoned by fled owners, either running them or having them assigned to themselves, and turned military rank into property. Dupuy says the officers did not only appropriate estates but also drew on the public treasury and the powers of their offices to accumulate. The army and the new administration therefore became the incubator of a Black propertied class standing alongside the older mulatto proprietors. This is the basis of his disagreement with C. L. R. James. James read Louverture's protection of the white planters as a political misjudgement by a leader who fundamentally shared the outlook of the former slaves. Dupuy argues that Louverture's interests had already diverged, because he headed an emerging landowning class whose prosperity depended on keeping the plantations intact and the former slaves working on them for wages. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Dupuy rejects James's claim that no fundamental difference of aim separated Louverture from the former slaves, arguing that Louverture led a new Black property-owning class with opposed interests.

In 1800 a new French commander reached Monte Cristi, on the Spanish side of Hispaniola, and told the field workers there that they were no longer property, that they were free and equal with the white townsmen, and that they should join the national guard. A woman from Saint-Domingue named Raimonde took him at his word and began calling herself a domestic servant. Her employer decided she had become a bad subject and arranged to sell her at Santiago, seventy miles inland. She was shut up the night before so that she could not run, then fastened to an iron bar fitted with rings and a lock and set on a mule for the journey. She was handed over for cash and tobacco. French officials intervened and she was released. Her testimony survives because she was interrogated, which makes her one of the very few people caught in this traffic whose own words were written down at the time.

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.

When war resumed between France and England, the authorities in Jamaica expelled the French refugees on the island who had never been naturalised. Many of them had fled Saint-Domingue a decade earlier and were now moving a second time. At least a thousand reached the territory the United States had just bought from France, and the true figure may be higher. On 26 February 1804 Governor William Claiborne wrote that several hundred French emigrants from Jamaica were on the Mississippi River and that two or three more vessels full of passengers were expected daily. On 13 April he recorded a boat on the river with a hundred and fifty French passengers from Jamaica. Some arrived with enslaved people who were probably never counted as refugees. Baptismal records at the Saint Louis Cathedral in New Orleans show children born there in 1804 and 1805 whose older brothers and sisters had been born in Jamaica between 1798 and 1803, which is the shape of a family that fled twice.