The labour code sends soldiers to drive the freed back to the estates

During his rule as governor general for life, Toussaint issued a code requiring most formerly enslaved people to return to work on the plantations they had left, with wages and some protections attached. King's comparison is unflattering and deliberate: the measure resembles the Black Codes of the American South after the civil war and the apprenticeship experiment that followed emancipation in Jamaica. The purpose was to restore the colony to its position as the largest sugar producer in the world and to use that revenue to rebuild after the fighting. The population disagreed, preferring to stay in the hills as peasant proprietors rather than return to the plains as employees, so Toussaint sent troops to compel them, which King says irritated the country people. He notes that Dessalines, Christophe, Petion and Boyer all continued the policy in some form.

Bonaparte pressed Talleyrand to conclude peace with England as fast as possible on the ground that the equinox was near and every day counted. The preliminaries were signed on the first of October, in time to fit out a fleet before the warm season brought fevers to the Caribbean, and Bonaparte immediately announced a massive expedition under General Leclerc. Girard's point is that the calendar drove the diplomacy. British mastery of the sea had made any large French expedition impossible for years, so removing the Royal Navy from the equation was the precondition for the invasion. He also shows the British agreeing readily. A British secretary of state observed that the empire Louverture had built was one of many evils grown out of the war and that Britain had no interest in preventing its destruction. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard shows racial and social hierarchies overriding a decade of Anglo-French enmity, with Britain and the United States actively assisting the destruction of Louverture's regime.

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.