Brunet's invitation to talk is the trap that takes Louverture

Leclerc, looking for a pretext after the surrender, stationed five hundred soldiers near Louverture's estate at Ennery and waited. Trouble between those troops and local people gave Louverture reason to ask that they be withdrawn, and Leclerc replied that General Brunet would come to discuss it. Instead Leclerc instructed Brunet to invite Louverture to headquarters and arrest him there. Woodward records that Louverture had been warned of the plan and went anyway, at night, to the Georges plantation. While he waited for Brunet to come back into the room, French soldiers seized him and put him aboard the frigate La Creole. He was carried to Le Cap, transferred to the Heros where his family joined him, and sailed for Brest. The whole sequence, Woodward argues, followed the secret instructions Bonaparte had given Leclerc before the fleet left France.

After independence, successive Haitian governments commissioned privateers of their own and turned them against the traffic in people. Some of these vessels carried names that announced the purpose. One was the Wilberforce, after the British campaigner against the slave trade. One was the Abolition de la Traite, meaning abolition of the trade. A third was the Philanthrope. They went after slaving ships making for Jamaica and Cuba. Captives taken out of those ships were brought to Haiti, where the constitution granted citizenship to anyone of African descent who arrived. They were then set to work under the labour system the Haitian state had inherited from the colony, which tied cultivators to estates and required them to stay. The men who commissioned these ships were answering the French commander in Santo Domingo, who was seizing young Haitians for sale abroad. Haiti was at once a refuge from the Atlantic trade and a state that still wanted field hands.

The Guadeloupe expedition succeeded where the Saint-Domingue one failed, and Girard counts the price. Richepance arrested the black soldiers at Pointe-a-Pitre soon after landing and held them on ships, then defeated the army led by Louis Delgres, who destroyed himself with his followers rather than surrender. Richepance died of yellow fever as Leclerc did, and his successors crushed what remained through a policy so harsh that it cost the island roughly a tenth of its population before slavery was formally restored. The wider instructions behind this were deliberately kept secret because of their reactionary content. Martinique and Saint Lucia, recovered at the peace of Amiens, were excluded from the emancipation law, black officers in Saint-Domingue were to be deported and their men disarmed, and Bonaparte publicly professed attachment to freedom while privately backing a half servile labour regime pending full re-enslavement. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

Pierrot tracks the racial vocabulary the Times of London used for Toussaint and finds it moving with events. For years the paper used black, negro and mulatto more or less at random, but after the Leclerc expedition sailed the descriptions hardened. An article of 1 October 1803 implied that Toussaint could neither read nor write and had been selected by white people as a fit instrument for their escape from persecution, while presenting Dessalines, mistakenly, as a freeborn mulatto of brutal disposition. The mechanism is a transfer of agency. As an active general Toussaint might be granted some white blood, and once defeated and imprisoned he became wholly black and wholly dependent on white direction, at which point the new leader of the revolution acquired the mixed ancestry that had been withdrawn from his predecessor.