Louverture executes Moise for siding with the labourers

The labourers on the plantations did not accept Louverture's settlement and resented his conciliation of the French planters, suspecting that a return of the old owners meant a return of the old regime. Their discontent found a leader in Moise, and the rising that followed aimed at driving out the whites and at overthrowing Louverture himself. Dupuy stresses what was actually at issue. Moise favoured distributing the plantations as small farms for the officers and the rank and file, and opposed both the continuation of the plantation system and the exploitation it required. Louverture understood the stakes, put down the rebellion, arrested Moise and had him executed. Dupuy says the labourers never forgave him. The episode is his clearest evidence that the class question, who owns the land and in whose interest it is worked, was already open before the French returned.

Once Talleyrand obtained British approval the expedition grew into a seven port operation of forty-three thousand men, half of them sailors. Transporting the army mobilised two thirds of the serviceable units in the French navy, including twenty-eight of its large ships of the line together with dozens of frigates and corvettes. Girard notes that no expedition of that size ever left French ports again while Bonaparte ruled. He also records the price of British consent. Bonaparte refused to give up an inch of French empire in the London negotiations while offering the British Dutch Ceylon and Spanish Trinidad, and Spain was asked to help pay for a fleet whose Brest squadron alone had passed three point three million francs, funded by borrowing against the following year's budget. Girard notes that police reports from the winter found the French population lukewarm about the venture and pessimistic about its chances of success.

The rest of the Guadeloupe flotilla carried on north and reached New York in August 1802 with twelve hundred and eighty four prisoners spread across its ships. The French naval officers described their errand in official language. The mayor of the city was not persuaded, wrote about the great number of black men held aboard the frigate Consolante, and refused permission to land. What happened next was never recorded in one place. Some of the captives died of dysentery in the harbour. Some got ashore and vanished. Some were sold in the United States in defiance of the law. The Consolante had arrived with three hundred people aboard and sailed for Guadeloupe with one hundred and eighty. Four other ships went on to Brest and delivered eight hundred prisoners nobody had managed to sell. Asked why so many names were missing from the rolls, the officers told the minister of the navy that many had died during the crossing.

Thomas uses the Logan Bill of 1806 as the test of his argument, and the test is the timing. Under Toussaint, stability and a refusal to declare independence had calmed the fears of the southern planter class and preserved American support. Dessalines's open declaration in 1804 and the violence he carried out against the remaining white planters tipped the balance against American tolerance of the emancipation threat, and the embargo legislation followed. The mechanism Thomas describes is a slaveholding republic reacting to the demonstration effect rather than to Haitian conduct abroad. He notes that Jefferson's position had moved repeatedly across two decades, that the prospect of Louisiana settlement would have nearly doubled American plantation capacity, and that Jefferson sided with economic interest in weighing the value of slavery to the southern economy.