The constitution's careful wording restores the Atlantic slave trade

Ten years of war had killed a fifth of the black population, around a hundred thousand people, most of them young men, and the labour shortage was strangling the export economy. Girard shows Louverture solving it through his diplomatic channels. His constitution gave him authority to take acceptable measures to increase the number of workers through the introduction of cultivators, phrasing he says was chosen so as not to offend the colony's black population while amounting to a revival of the Atlantic trade. Shortly after presenting the text he sent Joseph Bunel to Jamaica to ask its governor whether British slave traders would sell human cargo along the coast. London refused, but smuggling out of Jamaica was rampant. Louverture justified the arrangement by saying the arrivals would be given the semi-free cultivator status. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard flatly rejects accounts claiming Louverture planned to send troops to Africa to end the slave trade, and reads his constitution as reopening that trade for his own plantations.

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.

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.