Fifty-four warships sail for Saint-Domingue, delayed by Pauline

Thirty-two ships of the line plus twenty-two frigates and corvettes carried Leclerc's army under Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse. The expedition doubled as a political purge. Units and generals suspected of radical republicanism were posted far from Europe, among them chief of staff Charles Dugua, who openly blamed the colony's troubles on reactionary planters. Rigaud and Petion, the two men of colour Toussaint had driven into exile, travelled as advisers. The departure was delayed by the late arrival of Leclerc's wife Pauline. That delay mattered, because timing determined whether newly landed European troops would meet the fever season. Toussaint had expected French action since mid-December and had already posted his brother Paul and Clervaux to Santo Domingo, Laplume to the south, Dessalines and Age to the west, and Christophe and Maurepas to the north, with orders to fall back into the mountains if overwhelmed.

Maurepas was one of Toussaint Louverture's officers and commanded the department of the Northwest. In 1802 his wife shared his end. In the channel between Tortuga and the mainland the whole family was hoisted and hung from the great yards of a ship and flogged until they died, and the bodies were then thrown into the sea. The account records that Madame Maurepas spent the time urging her husband and her children to die like heroes rather than complaining. The same pages list Madame Chevalier, who put the noose around her own neck on the deck of the Duquesne, Madame Paul Louverture, taken by night with her children and drowned in the roadstead of Cap, and Louise Rateau, who kept a house in Port-au-Prince where men plotting against Rochambeau could meet. General Leclerc wrote to Napoleon that it had to be seen with what spirit both men and women went to meet death.

On 10 October 1802 General Francois Kerverseau, Napoleon's senior representative in Santo Domingo, published a proclamation to kill a story going round the colony. Several black and mixed race children had been put ashore from a French vessel named Le Berceau, and people were saying they had been sold as slaves with his blessing. Kerverseau insisted no sale had been authorised and promised that any official who approved one would be removed at once. He asked the town to distrust the people spreading the story and to trust instead those who watched over them while they slept. The timing explains the urgency. Napoleon's expedition had reached the island at the start of that year, and by autumn word was travelling that its real purpose was to put slavery back. France had already restored slavery in Guadeloupe. Anyone freed by the French emancipation law of 1794 had reason to read the arrival of Le Berceau as a warning.

In 1805, a few months after Dessalines was crowned emperor, free black and mixed race militiamen in Bahia were found wearing medallion portraits of him. Geggus makes the status of these men the point of the story. They were freemen, not enslaved, and he cites Stuart Schwartz to the effect that nothing connects the long cycle of Bahian slave revolts between 1807 and 1835 to either the French or the Haitian revolution, while such external influences are clearly visible among free men, as in the Tailors' conspiracy of 1798. The same holds for the largely African risings in nineteenth century Cuba. Free people of colour had more literacy and more mobility, so foreign news reached them first, which is why Geggus consistently finds Haitian traces in the free coloured layer of these societies rather than in the enslaved population. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus corrects Kenneth Maxwell, who dates to a visitor in Rio de Janeiro in 1792 a remark about the spell of white power being dissolved; the quotation in fact comes from 1806 and referred to the whole of the Americas.