Dubois credits Dessalines with ending French Louisiana

Dubois makes a reallocation of causal credit the centrepiece of his introduction. It was Dessalines rather than Toussaint Louverture, he argues, who was responsible for the withering of Bonaparte's plans for Louisiana, and therefore for Jefferson's great triumph and the exponential expansion of United States territory. The mechanism is the war of 1802 and 1803, in which Dessalines emerged as one of the key leaders against Bonaparte's troops after Toussaint had been deported. Dubois presses the point with a joke that carries the argument, that by rights there should be statues of Dessalines not only in New Orleans but throughout the Midwest, and that Americans may have to wait a while for them. The reallocation matters because Dessalines remains comparatively little studied and has lived for two centuries in Toussaint's historiographical shadow. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against the habit of crediting Toussaint with the collapse of French ambitions in North America, Dubois assigns the decisive role to Dessalines.

Maurepas was one of Toussaint Louverture's officers and commanded the department of the Northwest. In 1802 his wife shared his end. In the channel between Tortuga and the mainland the whole family was hoisted and hung from the great yards of a ship and flogged until they died, and the bodies were then thrown into the sea. The account records that Madame Maurepas spent the time urging her husband and her children to die like heroes rather than complaining. The same pages list Madame Chevalier, who put the noose around her own neck on the deck of the Duquesne, Madame Paul Louverture, taken by night with her children and drowned in the roadstead of Cap, and Louise Rateau, who kept a house in Port-au-Prince where men plotting against Rochambeau could meet. General Leclerc wrote to Napoleon that it had to be seen with what spirit both men and women went to meet death.

Arnaud Andre Roberjot Lartigue, a Creole planter who had fled the colony in 1803 and still expected France to retake the whole island, was appointed agent of the Saint-Domingue government at St Thomas. His actual assignment was narrow: French prize cases and the affairs of French citizens arriving on the Danish island. He went well past it. He put to Governor Muhlenfels the question whether a foreign nation had any right to trade with the revolted of Saint-Domingue and answered it himself, arguing that a revolt of Blacks in part of a colony does not interrupt ownership, that the revolt did not repeal the laws barring foreigners from the colony's ports, and that such trade broke France's treaties. He added a warning of self-interest, that what befalls one government today befalls another tomorrow and every slaveholding power should be prohibiting the traffic.

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.