Toussaint makes himself governor for life and gives France no role

Six months after invading and annexing Santo Domingo against a specific directive from Bonaparte, and imprisoning France's representative Roume for refusing assent, Toussaint promulgated a colonial constitution on his own initiative. It made him governor for life, let him name his own successor, and left France with nothing to do in a territory that was by then a colony only in name. Although forwarded to Paris for ratification it took effect immediately. Geggus argues Toussaint miscalculated: if French merchants were not privileged in Saint-Domingue the colony was of little use to France, and Bonaparte had already quietly cancelled his promotion to captain-general in March and struck his name from the army register. He rejects the reading that the constitution was a step toward independence, since a black state of former slaves would have invited embargo from Britain and the United States as well as war with France. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against historians who read the 1801 constitution as a stepping stone to independence, Geggus argues Toussaint would never take that step and always denied it, preferring the substance of independence without its trappings.

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.

Slavery had never been abolished in Martinique, because a British occupation kept the French emancipation law of 1794 from ever taking effect there. When Britain returned the island under the peace of Amiens in September 1802, France recovered a colony where the old system was still running and where British ships had kept the traffic from Africa going right through the war. French traders resumed at once. The first two French slaving vessels arrived in October, a month after the handover. By April 1803 French and British ships together had landed two thousand nine hundred people there. The contrast with Saint-Domingue is the point. In the larger colony the black population was armed and numerous, and French commanders kept postponing any public restoration of slavery. In Martinique nothing had to be restored. The traffic picked up where the war had interrupted it, under a French flag instead of a British one.

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.