Jefferson promises France an embargo, and the invasion follows

Britain and the United States had assisted Toussaint between 1798 and 1800 as a way of weakening France, and he had signed secret trade treaties and non-aggression pacts with both while posing as a loyal French servant. Neither encouraged independence. He had even betrayed to the British, as a goodwill gesture, a French attempt to raise a slave rebellion in Jamaica. Calculations changed when the European war ended and when Jefferson replaced Adams, bringing to power a ministry more attentive to southern slaveholders than to northern merchants. Jefferson assured the French he would embargo the black regime. British peace negotiations cleared the sea lanes that autumn and London signalled approval of a French reconquest. Spain and the Netherlands supplied ships, cash and provisions, so every major power with Caribbean interests was implicated in the expedition that landed in February 1802.

Britain handed Martinique back to France in September 1802 and left behind between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred prisoners of colour taken during the occupation. All of them were free under French law. The new French governor of the island considered dumping them on the coast of Venezuela among people he called savages. A man named Delpech then offered to take five hundred off his hands, promising to repay the British for their upkeep, to strand the most troublesome in Central America and to dispose of the rest as he saw fit. Two brigs escorted by the corvette Berceau sailed with them. Officials at Cumana and on the isthmus had been warned by the earlier Guadeloupe voyage and would not buy. The ships then put one hundred and fifty men ashore on the Miskito Coast of what is now Nicaragua, chained together in pairs, with two weeks of food. When the flotilla anchored at Santo Domingo in October, eighty five of the original five hundred were still aboard.

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.

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.