After a northern revolt, the paperless go back to the fields

Fick records the tightening that followed a widespread revolt of farm workers in the North in October 1801, assumed to have been inspired by Toussaint's nephew General Moise, who as agricultural inspector for the North was known to oppose his uncle's land policy. Under the proclamation of 25 November 1801, district military commanders were to prepare nominative censuses of every farm worker on every plantation in their jurisdiction and forward them to the generals and the governor. People who were not farm workers had to prove their occupation and carry a passport, and anyone found without one was automatically arrested and thrown back into plantation labour. Soldiers were forbidden to mingle with workers, and managers and overseers risked arrest and imprisonment if they failed to report runaways from other estates immediately.

Once Talleyrand obtained British approval the expedition grew into a seven port operation of forty-three thousand men, half of them sailors. Transporting the army mobilised two thirds of the serviceable units in the French navy, including twenty-eight of its large ships of the line together with dozens of frigates and corvettes. Girard notes that no expedition of that size ever left French ports again while Bonaparte ruled. He also records the price of British consent. Bonaparte refused to give up an inch of French empire in the London negotiations while offering the British Dutch Ceylon and Spanish Trinidad, and Spain was asked to help pay for a fleet whose Brest squadron alone had passed three point three million francs, funded by borrowing against the following year's budget. Girard notes that police reports from the winter found the French population lukewarm about the venture and pessimistic about its chances of success.

The rest of the Guadeloupe flotilla carried on north and reached New York in August 1802 with twelve hundred and eighty four prisoners spread across its ships. The French naval officers described their errand in official language. The mayor of the city was not persuaded, wrote about the great number of black men held aboard the frigate Consolante, and refused permission to land. What happened next was never recorded in one place. Some of the captives died of dysentery in the harbour. Some got ashore and vanished. Some were sold in the United States in defiance of the law. The Consolante had arrived with three hundred people aboard and sailed for Guadeloupe with one hundred and eighty. Four other ships went on to Brest and delivered eight hundred prisoners nobody had managed to sell. Asked why so many names were missing from the rolls, the officers told the minister of the navy that many had died during the crossing.

By early 1804 Davenport had sold the figures to new proprietors who set up in New York. The collection grew to seventy or eighty pieces, many carried over from the previous year, but Louverture is absent from the list and near his old position there is now a scene from Othello. White concludes that the figure was converted. The alteration is legible because wax artists had no aversion to gore, staging the execution of Louis the sixteenth with spouting fake blood, the killing of Marat, and a general dying under tomahawks. Louverture had been shown without any violent scene because he was attached to no single atrocity, unlike Dessalines. Her reading is that a hyperrealistic likeness of a black man governing was harder to display in a slaveholding society than a licensed Shakespearean murder, and that the change came in the very year independence was declared. Where this account departs from the standard one: White locates the silencing of the revolution in objects as well as texts, arguing visual culture was even more restrictive than the written record.