After Louverture is deported it is the maroons who keep fighting

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.

A few days before the battle of Crete-a-Pierrot, Dessalines was at Petite-Riviere de l'Artibonite where French residents were being killed in reprisal. Two young Frenchmen ran to Claire Heureuse and begged for their lives. She told them to hide under a bed and went to receive her husband, who came in from the field with Bazelais, Laurette, Lamartiniere and Lafortune. A sneeze from the next room gave the men away. One was cut down at once. Claire Heureuse went on her knees, called on the other officers to help her, and told her husband that the survivor was a doctor who might be useful to him one day. She held on to his tunic and let herself be dragged the length of the room until he gave way. The man was Michel Etienne Descourtilz, who later published his Voyage d'un naturaliste and an eight volume flora of the Antilles, and who admitted in print that he owed his life to her.

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.

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.