Leclerc thanks in the official gazette the women who saved his soldiers

The French expedition that landed in 1802 was destroyed largely by yellow fever, and its medical service went down with it, losing about seven hundred doctors. White residents had for the most part left the sick to manage on their own. Black and mixed race women in Saint-Domingue then went into the mountains, at considerable trouble, to gather the herbs they believed would halt the disease, and treated the French soldiers with the remedies they knew. One of them, remembered only as the widow Cotin, did so much that people called her the benefactor of humankind. These were women who had been enslaved the day before and who could as easily have urged their own people to take up arms. General Leclerc found himself obliged to thank them and to pay them a public tribute in the official gazette of Saint-Domingue. Within months the same women faced the killings ordered by his successor Rochambeau.

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.

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.

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.