Toussaint's cultivation code binds labour to a military state

Following the civil war against the former free coloureds of the South, Toussaint promulgated a comprehensive code of labour and property relations on 12 October 1800. Fick describes what it did to ordinary lives. Residential, occupational and social mobility was precluded entirely; farm workers were bound to their estates and to the soil. Military commanders in towns and villages were ordered, on pain of arrest or loss of office, to seek out and report anyone found lingering. Managers and drivers had to report on workers' conduct to district commanders, who reported to generals, who were personally answerable for enforcement. To prevent a smallholding peasantry from emerging beside the large estates, Toussaint separately prohibited all land transactions involving fewer than fifty carreaux, roughly 165 acres, so that no worker or association of workers could buy a carreau or two.

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.

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.

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.