No one may buy under fifty acres without proving they can develop it

Toussaint issued a decree forbidding the sale or purchase of land without a special permit, which could not be obtained for less than fifty acres and only on proof that the buyer could finance development. Healy explains the reversal it represents. Early in his administration he had experimented with a small-farm system, letting individuals acquire land cheaply, and judged it unsuccessful on the grounds that two thirds of the black population were African-born, untrained in farm management, and had been given a loathing of sustained labour by the slave drivers. Since export crops had to be produced in quantity to buy war supplies, he chose large estates instead. About a third of the land was worked by white planters and the other two thirds by the state under military commanders, many of whom, she concedes, became very wealthy.

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.

Sanite Belair, a young free woman from Verrettes, married Charles Belair in 1796 or 1797. He was Toussaint Louverture's nephew and aide de camp. In 1802 he took up arms against the Leclerc expedition from the heights of the Matheux, and held out there for more than two months. Sanite worked at pulling the scattered insurgent forces together and was said by some to be the soul of the conspiracy. Captured in a surprise attack at Corail Mirrault while her husband was away looking for ammunition, she was taken prisoner, and he surrendered rather than leave her. Dessalines, then serving the French, sent the pair to Leclerc with a letter accusing them. The court sentenced Charles to be shot and Sanite, on account of her sex, to be beheaded. On 5 October 1802 she demanded and was granted a soldier's death by firing squad, refused the blindfold, and could not be forced to the block.

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.