Dessalines tells the French that Toussaint uses him as a workhorse

Meeting the French general Brunet, Dessalines complained that Toussaint had only ever used him as a beast of burden, had never summoned him when an assembly met, and feared him more than he loved him. Two days afterwards, learning that Louverture had failed to order a local rebel commander to lay down arms under the recent ceasefire, he wrote at once to Leclerc denouncing that conduct as extraordinary. He was then invited to meet Leclerc at Cap-Francais, where the alleged disloyalty was certainly discussed, since Leclerc later cited the accusations of Dessalines as one of his main reasons for deciding to arrest Louverture. Louverture agreed to meet Brunet without a large escort on the evening of 7 June and was taken and deported to France in violation of the amnesty agreed only weeks before. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against the tradition that makes Dessalines the loyal lieutenant of Louverture, Girard argues he actively encouraged the French to remove him.

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.

On 4 July 1804, six months after the former colony declared itself independent under the name Haiti, several hundred black Philadelphians declined to celebrate the independence of the United States and celebrated the new republic instead. They gathered in the southern part of the city, elected officers, formed themselves into military companies, armed themselves with clubs and swords and marched through the streets, handling roughly any white person who crossed them. On one occasion marchers entered the house of a hostile white onlooker and attacked him and his friends. Philadelphia had the largest free black population in the country and had watched the war on the island for thirteen years through its own newspapers and its own docks. James Forten later told a member of the American Colonization Society that Haiti was proof that black people in America would become a great nation and could not always be held in bondage.