Wood has Napoleon send Leclerc in 1801, a year early

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.

Gaffield reads Louverture's constitution as an attempt to make the colony attractive to white planters. Article seventy-three provided that owners absent for whatever reason kept all rights over their possessions, and that presenting ownership records, or other records where those had been lost, would suffice to recover sequestered property, with the exception of those on the official list of French emigrants. She pairs this with article six making Catholicism the only religion that might be practised publicly, which did not forbid other worship but pushed it out of sight, and with article four opening all occupations to every man whatever his colour. The result she identifies is a document that maintained significant continuity with the colony and therefore gave the overwhelming majority of the population reasons to be dissatisfied, which had to be met with coercion.

Geggus argues that the blacksmith Gabriel's conspiracy in Richmond, Virginia looks very much like a response to the abolitionism of the French Republic rather than to the Haitian Revolution. At that moment an undeclared war ran between France and the United States, and Frenchmen living locally were said to have had a hand in it. Historians routinely link the conspiracy to Saint-Domingue, but contemporary sources show no trace of the conspirators discussing it, and the evidence of the black revolution's impact on Virginian slaves is in his judgement remarkably slight. He makes the same move about the attempt launched from Saint-Domingue in 1799 to raise a slave insurrection in Jamaica: the initiative came from Paris and was organised by the French official Philippe Roume, while Toussaint Louverture secretly revealed the plan to the British because a maritime blockade would have ruined him. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus denies the standard link between Gabriel's conspiracy and the Haitian Revolution, finding no contemporary evidence for it.

Sent to England by way of Jamaica to renew ties with the British after the constitution made him governor for life and he expelled the French agent Roume, Bunel got no further than Kingston, where the governor chose to handle matters himself. The public aims were to stop British warships harassing Dominguan commerce and to secure help against a French invasion. The governor's report to London records a further request made on Louverture's behalf: British assistance in importing Africans from the coast, whom Louverture called cultivators. He justified it by saying they would receive the semi-free cultivateur status and that their labour was indispensable to reviving the plantation economy, which as a plantation owner was his own first concern. Girard notes that anger at Louverture's dealings with slave traders helped ignite the cultivator rising near Cap Francais that October. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard documents Louverture, himself the son of a Middle Passage survivor, asking British help to purchase African labourers, which cuts against the standard portrait of him as an emancipationist abroad as well as at home.