A hilltop fort on the Artibonite holds the French three weeks

Bell gives the siege of La Crete a Pierrot its own heading and runs it from 4 to 24 March 1802. Dessalines had met Toussaint on the hilltop above Petite Riviere on 28 February. The position was a fort begun by the British and completed by Toussaint with a French engineer's help, set in a bend of the Artibonite River where it controlled the passes into the Grand Cahos mountains. The mechanism of its value was time rather than terrain alone. Every week the French spent reducing the redoubt was a week closer to the rainy season and to the yellow fever that would destroy Leclerc's army, and the defenders eventually cut their way out rather than surrender. Bell's account of the following months turns on how completely that exchange favoured the black commanders.

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.

Bonaparte persuaded Spain to return Louisiana under the secret treaty of San Ildefonso in October 1800, with the transfer taking effect in 1802. Girard insists the purpose was economic rather than strategic. French colonies produced coffee, sugar, cotton and indigo but no wheat, so they bought flour, timber and dried cod from American merchants on terms French officials considered extortionate. General Claude Victor, who was to command the garrison for Louisiana, argued that supplying the colonies without foreign help would be an immense advantage. The result would have been a self sufficient empire running from Louisiana to Guyane. Three expeditions were fitted out in 1802, Leclerc with twenty thousand men for Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo, Richepance with thirty five hundred for Guadeloupe, and Victor with three thousand for Louisiana, though the last sat in Flushing and Dunkirk for want of troops and transports. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard reads the Louisiana retrocession as a food supply scheme for the sugar colonies, against readings that make it a strategic threat to the United States.

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.