Jefferson takes office and calls Saint-Domingue another Algiers

Jefferson entered office and American policy shifted just as Bonaparte began preparing the expedition. Girard explains the change through interest rather than sentiment. Adams had favoured the commercial interests of New England merchants; Jefferson, in the wake of the Gabriel conspiracy, had every reason as a southern slave owner to fear the example of a society governed by former slaves. The young French ambassador raised the expedition at his first meeting with the new president and reported with pleasure that Jefferson had compared the colony to the piratical Barbary states and asserted, incorrectly, that Louverture had no support in the United States and that his example was dangerous for two thirds of the states. Girard notes this was the diplomatic assurance Talleyrand needed, though Jefferson later had second thoughts and Madison ordered strict neutrality.

From 1801, under Toussaint Louverture, the tactic of marronnage revived in Saint Domingue. The people who had been enslaved were now legally free and were being held to compulsory labour on the large estates, producing export crops over which they had no control, and they answered as they had answered slavery. They withdrew onto land where they could grow food, and rebuilt the structures of mutual support that two centuries of African practice in the Caribbean had shaped. When the moment allowed, they rose against the state and the large proprietors. Reading Haitian history as a clean break at 1804 hides this, because the political stage changed hands while the labour question stood still. For the former slaves, control over their own economic and social life remained as unsettled after independence as before, and the machinery used to compel their work was inherited rather than dismantled.

In July 1802 the French general Antoine Richepance began deporting the people he had captured while retaking Guadeloupe for Napoleon Bonaparte. About three thousand were shipped out in all. Eighteen hundred of them sailed in a single flotilla bound for Cartagena and Caracas, the two best slave markets within reach. French officers took away their clothes and put them in loincloths so that they would pass for Africans just landed from a slaving vessel. Many had been born in the Caribbean and had served as soldiers in the French army during the revolution. One had owned six coffee plantations and a hundred slaves of his own. Bonaparte had made a point of taking rank and uniforms away from officers of colour, and this was that policy carried to its conclusion. Spanish officials at both ports understood what was being offered and would not let anyone come ashore. They then sent warnings to other governors along the coast.

Captain Marcus Rainsford of the West India regiment published a thirty-page memoir in January 1802 recounting his misadventures in Santo Domingo in 1799, when a hurricane forced his ship into port, he met Toussaint, played billiards with him, was arrested as a suspected spy, condemned by a military jury and then released on Toussaint's intervention. Pierrot notes that the book ran against the grain at the moment of publication, when English opinion supported the Leclerc expedition. Rainsford argued that an independent Haiti posed no threat to British colonies, that the revolutionaries had no wish to attack them, and that the French expedition would fail for logistical and moral reasons. The mechanism of the book's limitation is that it defended Toussaint as an individual rather than the political force behind him, which is the separation Pierrot's whole argument tracks.