The 1801 constitution turns each plantation into a factory by law

Fick reads Toussaint's constitution of 8 July 1801 as a document that abolishes slavery and constitutionalises compulsion in the same breath. It proclaimed that no slaves could exist in the territory and that all men were born, lived and died free and French, with equality before the law. It then stated that the colony, being essentially agricultural, could suffer no loss or interruption of production, so each plantation had to function as a factory requiring the permanent concentration of field workers assembled as a family under the owner's paternal authority. The governor alone held power to make all measures relating to agricultural discipline, in conformity with the cultivation code of the previous October. Rights to personal security, inviolable domicile, private property, trial, schools and petition were granted; assembly and association were formally prohibited and Catholicism declared official. Corroborated by 3 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against the standard reading, Bell holds that the 1801 constitution was not a de facto declaration of independence but a document drafted to reassure France and its neighbours.

Britain handed Martinique back to France in September 1802 and left behind between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred prisoners of colour taken during the occupation. All of them were free under French law. The new French governor of the island considered dumping them on the coast of Venezuela among people he called savages. A man named Delpech then offered to take five hundred off his hands, promising to repay the British for their upkeep, to strand the most troublesome in Central America and to dispose of the rest as he saw fit. Two brigs escorted by the corvette Berceau sailed with them. Officials at Cumana and on the isthmus had been warned by the earlier Guadeloupe voyage and would not buy. The ships then put one hundred and fifty men ashore on the Miskito Coast of what is now Nicaragua, chained together in pairs, with two weeks of food. When the flotilla anchored at Santo Domingo in October, eighty five of the original five hundred were still aboard.

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.

The decree offered to fund the return of black and mixed race refugees from the revolution who were stranded in the United States for want of means, and allotted American captains forty gourdes for each person carried to Haiti. It ordered that the text be printed, published and posted, and that a copy go directly to Congress. The article singles this document out because its French does not meet educated standards and because the two American papers that ran it produced different readings of the same sentence, suggesting editors struggling with difficult handwriting or unclear meaning. No secretary signed it. Whether the wording is Dessalines's own or that of an imperfectly schooled secretary, the article reads it as a trace of Haitian leaders seizing print before their relationship to Western literacy was settled, and as an expression of sympathy for black people living in a slaveholding country.