The 1801 charter frees those born in the colony and nobody else

Casimir calls Toussaint's 1801 constitution a marvel of delicate balances and unresolved ambiguities, and he reads it by asking who is missing. All citizens born in the colony were declared free and French. What became of those not born there, which is to say almost the whole population, the text does not say. All were equal before the law and could hold any post regardless of colour, yet a house arrest regime covered most of the people not born on colonial soil. Since those workers were insufficient for large-scale plantation agriculture, the document concedes benefits to the slave trade for importing supplementary labour, leaving the frequency of such imports to the governor general's discretion. Casimir also treats the offer as a genuine political proposal made from strength, after Toussaint had secured a monopoly of public power over the whole island. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: The author denies that Toussaint's constitution was the furthest advance of universal freedom, reading its formula of free and French as a limit rather than a triumph.

Jefferson entered office and American policy shifted just as Bonaparte began preparing the expedition. Girard explains the change through interest rather than sentiment. Adams had favoured the commercial interests of New England merchants; Jefferson, in the wake of the Gabriel conspiracy, had every reason as a southern slave owner to fear the example of a society governed by former slaves. The young French ambassador raised the expedition at his first meeting with the new president and reported with pleasure that Jefferson had compared the colony to the piratical Barbary states and asserted, incorrectly, that Louverture had no support in the United States and that his example was dangerous for two thirds of the states. Girard notes this was the diplomatic assurance Talleyrand needed, though Jefferson later had second thoughts and Madison ordered strict neutrality.

Girard narrates the arrest from an eyewitness account. Officers took both men at a Kingston inn, stripped them and slit open their clothing in search of concealed papers, searched their lodgings, and moved them under guard first to a Kingston cell and then to the seat of government at Spanish Town for interrogation by the governor's council. It was Sasportas's third detention in six months, after the capture of his ship by a British cruiser in the spring and his deportation from Curacao in the autumn, and Girard suggests he expected to talk his way out again. He refused to confess. A Kingston Jew who had known him since childhood then confirmed that he had been in contact with the Blue Mountain Maroons, which broke the story he was trying to hold. Balcarres had moved only after Louverture's warnings reached him.

Citing the nineteenth century historian Thomas Madiou, Le Glaunec fixes the opening of hostilities against the French expedition to the evening of 4 February 1802, when Fort Picolet fired a cannonball at the arriving squadron and by doing so gave the signal that fighting had begun. The same fort closes the story. From its walls the last surviving French soldiers and the fighters of the indigenous army exchanged their final words and looks during the evacuation of the city, which the author dates to eleven days after the Battle of Vertieres. Picolet therefore brackets the whole war of independence in the north, opening it in February 1802 and witnessing its end in late November 1803. The author notes that the Atlantic below the fort is the same water that carried enslaved Africans to the colony in the eighteenth century and then carried Bonaparte's troops.