A colony wide rising set for Thermidor fails for want of a chief

Writing to the minister of marine on 25 August, Leclerc reported that he had just discovered a large conspiracy aimed at raising the entire colony, placed its intended date at the end of Thermidor and explained its failure by the absence of a chief. De Young converts that to roughly the sixteenth of August. The significance for his argument is that the revolt of Belair and Larose was not a local affair but one strand of a general rising by the guerrilla commanders. Within a week of the letter the principal bands were in the field. Sans Souci took up arms at Dondon the following day, Petit Noel on the twenty ninth, and at the same moment Macaya, Mavougou and Va Malheureux moved with Lamour Derance to take possession of the central plains and the northern ranges.

Girard fixes the composition window precisely. Toussaint arrived at Fort de Joux on 24 August 1802 and asked for writing materials at once; the prison commander Baille supplied them against instructions. Within two months the prisoner wrote eight letters in his own hand, the most intense period of writing in his life. The memoir was produced between his arrival and 17 September, when Caffarelli came from Paris for a series of interviews and took the text away with him. Girard identifies four manuscripts: two secretarial drafts, a copy in Toussaint's own hand of twenty-one pages in small script, and a fair copy signed for the First Consul. Caffarelli's report shows the text was dictated to Jeannin, a clerk of the Pontarlier prefecture, who acted only as a copyist while Toussaint reread and corrected.

On 27 April 1800 Toussaint got the French commissioner Roume to sign an order authorising him to take possession of Spanish Santo Domingo. Bell stresses the verb. The order was extracted rather than received, part of a pattern in which Toussaint obtained French legal cover for decisions he had already made. The mechanism was the dormant Treaty of Basel, which had transferred the eastern colony to France in 1795 and had never been executed for want of troops. Acting on it gave Toussaint the whole island, closed the land route by which enslaved people were still being trafficked from the Spanish side, and removed the last territory where a rival authority could shelter. It also alarmed Paris, since a governor who could annex a neighbouring colony on his own initiative was plainly beyond correction by decree.

In January 1810, with the last ships from Cuba still arriving, Governor William Claiborne set down his view of the population he now governed. He confessed apprehension that disorder might break out in a place so mixed and growing more mixed every day. He put the number of free men of colour in and around New Orleans capable of bearing arms at not less than eight hundred, counting those recently landed from Cuba. He allowed that their conduct so far had been correct. He then added that in a country with so large a black population they should be carefully watched. He had already asked the American consul at Santiago de Cuba to steer the remaining French elsewhere, and in November he made the same request of the American agent in Jamaica, saying that Louisiana already had a greater proportion of that kind of population than suited its interests. A rising of enslaved people broke out upriver the following year.