Louverture asks Britain to help him buy Africans for his plantations

Sent to England by way of Jamaica to renew ties with the British after the constitution made him governor for life and he expelled the French agent Roume, Bunel got no further than Kingston, where the governor chose to handle matters himself. The public aims were to stop British warships harassing Dominguan commerce and to secure help against a French invasion. The governor's report to London records a further request made on Louverture's behalf: British assistance in importing Africans from the coast, whom Louverture called cultivators. He justified it by saying they would receive the semi-free cultivateur status and that their labour was indispensable to reviving the plantation economy, which as a plantation owner was his own first concern. Girard notes that anger at Louverture's dealings with slave traders helped ignite the cultivator rising near Cap Francais that October. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard documents Louverture, himself the son of a Middle Passage survivor, asking British help to purchase African labourers, which cuts against the standard portrait of him as an emancipationist abroad as well as at home.

Girard traces the genesis of the expedition to an order to prepare a force of three thousand six hundred troops at Brest. Coming shortly after Bonaparte had turned against Louverture, the squadron was most likely intended as the first instalment of a force that would grow once peace with England was secured. He is explicit that earlier orders do not count as the beginning. A first instruction to ship out had come as early as December 1799, countermanded within days; new orders followed in January 1800; the fleet was repeatedly delayed, rerouted to Egypt when Bonaparte chose alliance instead, and then held up at Toulon. Once the peace preliminaries were signed, six thousand men were ordered ready to sail from Brest by 20 October with five thousand six hundred to follow from four other ports. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard dates the decision to invade six months before the meeting at Malmaison that other histories treat as the turning point.

Bonaparte persuaded Spain to return Louisiana under the secret treaty of San Ildefonso in October 1800, with the transfer taking effect in 1802. Girard insists the purpose was economic rather than strategic. French colonies produced coffee, sugar, cotton and indigo but no wheat, so they bought flour, timber and dried cod from American merchants on terms French officials considered extortionate. General Claude Victor, who was to command the garrison for Louisiana, argued that supplying the colonies without foreign help would be an immense advantage. The result would have been a self sufficient empire running from Louisiana to Guyane. Three expeditions were fitted out in 1802, Leclerc with twenty thousand men for Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo, Richepance with thirty five hundred for Guadeloupe, and Victor with three thousand for Louisiana, though the last sat in Flushing and Dunkirk for want of troops and transports. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard reads the Louisiana retrocession as a food supply scheme for the sugar colonies, against readings that make it a strategic threat to the United States.

Wood opens with Napoleon sending Leclerc to restore French rule in Saint Domingue after Toussaint had made himself master of the island, and dates the dispatch to 1801. With the initial French successes, many black and mixed-race troops and their officers entered French service, and in suppressing the sporadic risings that followed the restoration of French rule Dessalines earned from Leclerc the title of butcher of the Negroes. The mechanism of the reversal was news from elsewhere. Word that Napoleon had ordered slavery restored in Guadeloupe and Martinique was the signal for defection throughout the ranks of the colonial troops. Readers should note the fleet did not arrive until early 1802, so Wood's date refers to the decision rather than the landing, and she gives the meeting between Dessalines and Petion as the point at which the insurrection was agreed.