Cultivators rise in the north and kill three hundred white colonists

Field workers rose over a broad band of the North Province and killed upward of three hundred white colonists, motivated, Geggus judges, by the forced labour law of the previous year that the new constitution had just reinforced. The revolt seems to have been instigated by Moyse, the charismatic and wilful commandant of the North and Toussaint's leading general, whom he called his nephew and had known all his life. Much remains obscure because the rising was crushed quickly and Toussaint prevented any participant from speaking in his own defence. Some historians think Moyse wanted the plantations divided; Geggus considers it more certain that he wanted them run by black officers rather than Europeans. The long proclamation Toussaint issued a month later reaffirmed the labour decree, introduced identity cards for town residents and a census of plantation workers, and brought back the ball and chain.

Leclerc was summoned to Paris on 8 October and only officially appointed captain general of the army of Saint-Domingue two weeks later. Girard attributes the delay to reluctance. Leclerc tried to decline on the ground that he could not leave his unmarried sister alone in France, and Bonaparte replied that she would be married the next day to a husband yet to be chosen. What settled it was money. The post carried a hundred thousand francs a year plus twenty-three thousand in living expenses and a further large allowance, and Bonaparte handed him his instructions with the remark that here was a chance to get rich. Those instructions told Leclerc to advertise cooperation with Louverture in order to land safely, then deport the black officers, and to aim at free black cultivators rather than restored slavery. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard argues Bonaparte's written goal for the colony was free black cultivators rather than the restoration of slavery most scholars assume he planned from the outset.

The Guadeloupe expedition succeeded where the Saint-Domingue one failed, and Girard counts the price. Richepance arrested the black soldiers at Pointe-a-Pitre soon after landing and held them on ships, then defeated the army led by Louis Delgres, who destroyed himself with his followers rather than surrender. Richepance died of yellow fever as Leclerc did, and his successors crushed what remained through a policy so harsh that it cost the island roughly a tenth of its population before slavery was formally restored. The wider instructions behind this were deliberately kept secret because of their reactionary content. Martinique and Saint Lucia, recovered at the peace of Amiens, were excluded from the emancipation law, black officers in Saint-Domingue were to be deported and their men disarmed, and Bonaparte publicly professed attachment to freedom while privately backing a half servile labour regime pending full re-enslavement. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

The decree offered to fund the return of black and mixed race refugees from the revolution who were stranded in the United States for want of means, and allotted American captains forty gourdes for each person carried to Haiti. It ordered that the text be printed, published and posted, and that a copy go directly to Congress. The article singles this document out because its French does not meet educated standards and because the two American papers that ran it produced different readings of the same sentence, suggesting editors struggling with difficult handwriting or unclear meaning. No secretary signed it. Whether the wording is Dessalines's own or that of an imperfectly schooled secretary, the article reads it as a trace of Haitian leaders seizing print before their relationship to Western literacy was settled, and as an expression of sympathy for black people living in a slaveholding country.