Toussaint tells Moyse he has beaten three nations and will fight

Bell quotes an exceptionally unguarded statement Toussaint made in October 1800 in the company of General Moyse, whom he had adopted as a nephew during slavery and who commanded at Fort Liberte. Toussaint said he had made war for a long time, had dealt with three nations and beaten all three, and that his soldiers would always be firm in defence of their liberty. He added that he did not want war with France, that he had preserved the colony for her, and that if she came to attack him he would defend himself. Bell treats this as the most accurate available statement of Toussaint's position: he preferred to remain under French sovereignty so long as general liberty and his own authority were untouched. The mechanism of the later catastrophe was that Bonaparte would not accept either condition.

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.

Bonaparte persuaded Spain to return Louisiana under the secret treaty of San Ildefonso in October 1800, with the transfer taking effect in 1802. Girard insists the purpose was economic rather than strategic. French colonies produced coffee, sugar, cotton and indigo but no wheat, so they bought flour, timber and dried cod from American merchants on terms French officials considered extortionate. General Claude Victor, who was to command the garrison for Louisiana, argued that supplying the colonies without foreign help would be an immense advantage. The result would have been a self sufficient empire running from Louisiana to Guyane. Three expeditions were fitted out in 1802, Leclerc with twenty thousand men for Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo, Richepance with thirty five hundred for Guadeloupe, and Victor with three thousand for Louisiana, though the last sat in Flushing and Dunkirk for want of troops and transports. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard reads the Louisiana retrocession as a food supply scheme for the sugar colonies, against readings that make it a strategic threat to the United States.

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.