Louverture jails the French agent and marches east

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.

Yellow fever reached the French expeditionary army in Saint-Domingue within weeks of its victory. Doctors first took it for plague. The sick complained of violent pain, then fever and thirst and vomiting, the tongue thickened, the gums blackened, the skin turned yellow, and death came within three days or between the seventh and the eleventh. Cold drinks, baths, bleeding, emetics and mild purgatives were tried and did nothing. On 1 August 1802 a squadron from Toulon under Rear Admiral Dumanoir anchored in the roadstead at Cap with three thousand men aboard, and on 7 August three transports arrived with two thousand more. They were given no time to acclimatise and in under twenty days all of them had been swept away. The funeral tables kept by the expedition itself record more than thirty five thousand men dead in this period. Corpses were collected by cart at night and tipped into a common pit.

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.

When war resumed between France and England, the authorities in Jamaica expelled the French refugees on the island who had never been naturalised. Many of them had fled Saint-Domingue a decade earlier and were now moving a second time. At least a thousand reached the territory the United States had just bought from France, and the true figure may be higher. On 26 February 1804 Governor William Claiborne wrote that several hundred French emigrants from Jamaica were on the Mississippi River and that two or three more vessels full of passengers were expected daily. On 13 April he recorded a boat on the river with a hundred and fifty French passengers from Jamaica. Some arrived with enslaved people who were probably never counted as refugees. Baptismal records at the Saint Louis Cathedral in New Orleans show children born there in 1804 and 1805 whose older brothers and sisters had been born in Jamaica between 1798 and 1803, which is the shape of a family that fled twice.