Christophe hands Leclerc 1,500 men and 100 cannon on generous terms

Leclerc had lost close to five thousand men before counting the sick, and understood that his position could collapse as quickly as it had been won. Rather than continue a war of columns in the mountains he opened terms with individual commanders, correctly judging that generals who disliked guerrilla warfare would take a deal. Christophe and Maurepas went first. The terms recognised the freedom of the black population and let officers keep their existing ranks on incorporation into the French army, which is why the surrender did not look like defeat to those accepting it. Christophe brought over a detachment of fifteen hundred men and a hundred cannon and placed his territory under French control. Dessalines and the others followed at once, isolating Toussaint. The mechanism was purchase rather than conquest, and its cost appeared later when whole formations recrossed to the insurgency with their weapons.

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 Trouble between those troops and local people gave Louverture reason to ask that they be withdrawn, and Leclerc replied that General Brunet would come to discuss it.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.

The rest of the Guadeloupe flotilla carried on north and reached New York in August 1802 with twelve hundred and eighty four prisoners spread across its ships. The French naval officers described their errand in official language. The mayor of the city was not persuaded, wrote about the great number of black men held aboard the frigate Consolante, and refused permission to land. What happened next was never recorded in one place. Some of the captives died of dysentery in the harbour. Some got ashore and vanished. Some were sold in the United States in defiance of the law. The Consolante had arrived with three hundred people aboard and sailed for Guadeloupe with one hundred and eighty. Four other ships went on to Brest and delivered eight hundred prisoners nobody had managed to sell. Asked why so many names were missing from the rolls, the officers told the minister of the navy that many had died during the crossing.

Thomas uses the Logan Bill of 1806 as the test of his argument, and the test is the timing. Under Toussaint, stability and a refusal to declare independence had calmed the fears of the southern planter class and preserved American support. Dessalines's open declaration in 1804 and the violence he carried out against the remaining white planters tipped the balance against American tolerance of the emancipation threat, and the embargo legislation followed. The mechanism Thomas describes is a slaveholding republic reacting to the demonstration effect rather than to Haitian conduct abroad. He notes that Jefferson's position had moved repeatedly across two decades, that the prospect of Louisiana settlement would have nearly doubled American plantation capacity, and that Jefferson sided with economic interest in weighing the value of slavery to the southern economy.