Toussaint's constitution calls everyone an inhabitant, not an indigène

Perry establishes by absence when Haitian indigenous rhetoric begins. Nobody appears to have described enslaved Africans, creole or otherwise, as indigènes before the Revolution, and the word is missing from Toussaint's 1801 colonial constitution, which addresses itself instead to the habitans of Saint-Domingue. That choice emphasises current residence and, in keeping with Toussaint's conciliatory policy toward white colonists, takes in whites, blacks and people of mixed race alike, since the same text asserts that all inhabitants regardless of race are free and French. Perry's finding, drawn from counting uses in the histories of Madiou and Ardouin, is that indigène floods the narration only when the French fleet appears late in 1801 to remove Toussaint, roughly a year ahead of the moment Dessalines defected and was named chief of the indigenous army, and vanishes shortly after independence. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Healy dates the constitution to its adoption by the central committee on 9 May 1801, where most accounts date the document by its proclamation at Le Cap on 7 July.

Girard traces the genesis of the expedition to an order to prepare a force of three thousand six hundred troops at Brest. Coming shortly after Bonaparte had turned against Louverture, the squadron was most likely intended as the first instalment of a force that would grow once peace with England was secured. He is explicit that earlier orders do not count as the beginning. A first instruction to ship out had come as early as December 1799, countermanded within days; new orders followed in January 1800; the fleet was repeatedly delayed, rerouted to Egypt when Bonaparte chose alliance instead, and then held up at Toulon. Once the peace preliminaries were signed, six thousand men were ordered ready to sail from Brest by 20 October with five thousand six hundred to follow from four other ports. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard dates the decision to invade six months before the meeting at Malmaison that other histories treat as the turning point.

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.

Wood opens with Napoleon sending Leclerc to restore French rule in Saint Domingue after Toussaint had made himself master of the island, and dates the dispatch to 1801. With the initial French successes, many black and mixed-race troops and their officers entered French service, and in suppressing the sporadic risings that followed the restoration of French rule Dessalines earned from Leclerc the title of butcher of the Negroes. The mechanism of the reversal was news from elsewhere. Word that Napoleon had ordered slavery restored in Guadeloupe and Martinique was the signal for defection throughout the ranks of the colonial troops. Readers should note the fleet did not arrive until early 1802, so Wood's date refers to the decision rather than the landing, and she gives the meeting between Dessalines and Petion as the point at which the insurrection was agreed.