Leclerc accepts the command once he is told what it pays

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.

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.

Louverture had pressed Roume for months to authorise a takeover of the Spanish half of the island, accusing his neighbours of kidnapping black Dominguians and staging public demonstrations to manufacture outrage. When the Spanish governor investigated and gave assurances, Roume withdrew his earlier decree. Louverture then imprisoned the French agent and invaded anyway, on hearing that Paris was about to forbid it. Girard's finding concerns what did not happen next. The documents Louverture published to justify the invasion say nothing about the fate of Dominican slaves, and the proclamations he issued on the march promised to respect his neighbours' religion, lives and property. During the handover negotiations he complained that Dominican exiles were leaving with their slaves, on the ground that this stripped the territory of workers. He treats the silence of the record as the finding, since a governor eager to be seen abolishing slavery would have said so in print. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard says the record is far from clear that Louverture abolished slavery in Santo Domingo after invading, contradicting the common assertion that he did so at once.

Pierrot tracks the racial vocabulary the Times of London used for Toussaint and finds it moving with events. For years the paper used black, negro and mulatto more or less at random, but after the Leclerc expedition sailed the descriptions hardened. An article of 1 October 1803 implied that Toussaint could neither read nor write and had been selected by white people as a fit instrument for their escape from persecution, while presenting Dessalines, mistakenly, as a freeborn mulatto of brutal disposition. The mechanism is a transfer of agency. As an active general Toussaint might be granted some white blood, and once defeated and imprisoned he became wholly black and wholly dependent on white direction, at which point the new leader of the revolution acquired the mixed ancestry that had been withdrawn from his predecessor.