A cannonball from Fort Picolet opens the war against Leclerc's fleet

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.

With the French expedition days from landing and still convinced that Jefferson wholeheartedly supported its mission, Secretary of State Madison instructed the American commercial agent at Cap to adopt a policy of strict neutrality. Girard spells out what the phrase meant in practice. The agent was to make no effort to combat American contraband reaching the rebels. The misunderstanding, he writes, created much acrimony after the French landing, and it fits his larger argument that the expedition's supply arrangements were built on assurances that quietly dissolved. Jefferson's second thoughts had come too late to matter for the sailing, since the largest squadron in the French navy was already preparing to leave Brest and Bonaparte would never have accepted the independence of the most valuable French colony under Anglo-American tutelage. Girard reads the episode as the first sign that the supply arrangements underpinning the whole expedition rested on promises no one intended to police.

The rest of the Guadeloupe flotilla carried on north and reached New York in August 1802 with twelve hundred and eighty four prisoners spread across its ships. The French naval officers described their errand in official language. The mayor of the city was not persuaded, wrote about the great number of black men held aboard the frigate Consolante, and refused permission to land. What happened next was never recorded in one place. Some of the captives died of dysentery in the harbour. Some got ashore and vanished. Some were sold in the United States in defiance of the law. The Consolante had arrived with three hundred people aboard and sailed for Guadeloupe with one hundred and eighty. Four other ships went on to Brest and delivered eight hundred prisoners nobody had managed to sell. Asked why so many names were missing from the rolls, the officers told the minister of the navy that many had died during the crossing.

In 1805, a few months after Dessalines was crowned emperor, free black and mixed race militiamen in Bahia were found wearing medallion portraits of him. Geggus makes the status of these men the point of the story. They were freemen, not enslaved, and he cites Stuart Schwartz to the effect that nothing connects the long cycle of Bahian slave revolts between 1807 and 1835 to either the French or the Haitian revolution, while such external influences are clearly visible among free men, as in the Tailors' conspiracy of 1798. The same holds for the largely African risings in nineteenth century Cuba. Free people of colour had more literacy and more mobility, so foreign news reached them first, which is why Geggus consistently finds Haitian traces in the free coloured layer of these societies rather than in the enslaved population. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus corrects Kenneth Maxwell, who dates to a visitor in Rio de Janeiro in 1792 a remark about the spell of white power being dissolved; the quotation in fact comes from 1806 and referred to the whole of the Americas.