A humiliating search ends Toussaint's hope of leaving Fort de Joux

Girard tracks the collapse of the prisoner's strategy through the paperwork. Toussaint hoped the memoir would at least prompt Bonaparte to contact him, and it did not. Three weeks after Caffarelli left he sent further letters in vain, announced that he wanted to write a second memoir, and asked that one of his sons be sent to serve as his secretary or to help him express himself. He invited the First Consul once more to pronounce on his case. Those were his last letters and they went unanswered. Paris responded by ordering the confiscation of his writing materials; his notebooks were taken immediately and he had to surrender papers hidden in his breeches. Baille noted that he seemed deeply affected by the loss. Girard dates his abandonment of hope to a particularly humiliating search in mid-October 1802.

Girard accepts that Dessalines did not personally capture the Belairs and then shows what he did afterwards. He wrote to Leclerc stating that he had undeniable evidence that Charles Belair had led the latest insurrection and asking that Charles and his wife be punished. Both were sentenced to death and executed. The article treats this as one instance of a habit rather than an aberration. Denouncing rivals as traitors so that the French would execute or deport them was so common in his correspondence of that year that it amounts to a pattern, and such denunciations were frequent in the intensely competitive politics of the revolution. Personal animus was probably also involved, since Belair had served under his direct command in the spring campaign and had used his relationship with Louverture to appeal against and ignore his orders. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: This directly contradicts the reading in de Young's 1960 article, also in this batch, which argues that Dessalines was faced with a fait accompli and did not seek Belair's death.

General Jean-Louis Ferrand, who had taken command at Santo Domingo in late 1803 after refusing a place on a British ship out, could not defeat the new state militarily but could make its trade dangerous. French privateers, supported by Spanish corsairs under the Franco-Spanish alliance, patrolled the waters around Hispaniola and seized merchants suspected of dealing with the people they called brigands, taking more than a hundred American vessels in two years. Because Ferrand's own position was precarious, prizes were processed in Spanish ports. Ferrer's finding, which Gaffield uses, is that property was often condemned without trial and the ships and their human and other cargo sold, with duties owed to the crown divided among Cuban officials instead. Haiti answered by declaring war on Spain and seizing Spanish vessels for condemnation in Haitian ports. Cuban authorities, meanwhile, preferred to behave as though Haiti did not exist.

When the Indigenous army was close to breaking under Bonaparte's expedition, Fouchard says it was the maroons who were still in the field and who pushed the generals out of their inertia. During the truce that followed the deportation of Louverture they carried on alone, raiding, burning, sabotaging and sniping, and he cites Christophe's own admission of this to General Pamphile de Lacroix. He names Sylla, Sans Souci and Boukman as the maroon leaders who showed the way. His account of the method is specific: with fewer men than the enemy, victory came from poisoning the rivers, destroying roads and bridges, and burning everything until the last invader had gone. Two centuries of guerrilla practice were what allowed the regular troops to finish the job, and the army that had won in Italy and Egypt left fifty thousand dead behind. Fouchard credits Louverture, Dessalines, Petion and Christophe, and above all the maroons. Where this account departs from the standard one: Fouchard makes the maroons rather than the regular Indigenous army the decisive force in the war of independence.