The constitution abolishes slavery and reopens the African trade

A central assembly of six educated men of colour and whites drafted a constitution which Louverture proclaimed on the parade ground at Le Cap. It made him governor with almost unlimited powers, gave him the right to name his successor, set his salary at three hundred thousand francs, made Catholicism the religion of the island and declared everyone free. Woodward then records the provision that sits awkwardly beside the rest. Slavery was abolished, yet the African slave trade was encouraged so that plantations could be supplied with agricultural workers. A copy of the document was sent to Bonaparte, who had not been consulted. Woodward notes that the French agent Vincent was not satisfied with the text, refused to defend it, and that fear of the constitution pushed Bonaparte toward invasion. The charter therefore both secured emancipation on paper and revived the traffic that had created slavery. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Woodward states plainly that Louverture's constitution encouraged the African slave trade to supply plantation labour, a provision most popular accounts of the 1801 charter omit.

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.

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.

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.