The governor's own sugar estate cannot pay its manager

Toussaint's most notable acquisition during the revolution was a lease on the Manquets plantation, among the largest sugar works in the colony in the seventeen eighties and the prize possession of the comte de Noé. Management records surviving in Philadelphia show what it actually produced. Output was worth 6,519 gourdes in the first of these years and 13,349 in the second, a small return once a quarter of the crop went to the workers, who were no longer slaves, and after an outlay of 4,143 gourdes to rebuild the water mill. The manager was owed years of arrears and complained that the labourers pressed him constantly about their pay. When Toussaint was deported in June 1802 a detailed French audit found his other estates equally unproductive. The authors conclude that sugar on his own land was nowhere near prerevolutionary levels and that the long decline had already begun. Where this account departs from the standard one: Toussaint claimed the colony under his government was more prosperous than before the revolution; his own plantation accounts contradict him.

In July 1802 the French general Antoine Richepance began deporting the people he had captured while retaking Guadeloupe for Napoleon Bonaparte. About three thousand were shipped out in all. Eighteen hundred of them sailed in a single flotilla bound for Cartagena and Caracas, the two best slave markets within reach. French officers took away their clothes and put them in loincloths so that they would pass for Africans just landed from a slaving vessel. Many had been born in the Caribbean and had served as soldiers in the French army during the revolution. One had owned six coffee plantations and a hundred slaves of his own. Bonaparte had made a point of taking rank and uniforms away from officers of colour, and this was that policy carried to its conclusion. Spanish officials at both ports understood what was being offered and would not let anyone come ashore. They then sent warnings to other governors along the coast.

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.

Naval war with Britain had destroyed the French merchant fleet, leaving Saint-Domingue dependent on American shipping, so when Congress embargoed French colonies in retaliation for privateering the colony's export economy stopped. Louverture wrote to Adams expressing surprise and sadness that American vessels had abandoned his ports, and sent Joseph Bunel to carry the letter and argue the case. Girard notes that Louverture staffed his civil administration almost entirely with white secretaries, priests, merchants and clerks, since Black and mixed-race men dominated the army, and that sending a white envoy to a slaveholding republic was ordinary politics rather than an anomaly. Bunel met Secretary of State Pickering and a congressional delegation from South Carolina, then dined with Adams. Pickering, describing the mission in his correspondence, identified Louverture as the Black commander in chief and called Bunel merely a messenger, saying nothing of his colour.