General Brunet invites Toussaint to a meeting and arrests him instead

Toussaint had kept his side of the May agreement and stayed at his plantation at Ennery near Gonaives. The French nonetheless suspected him of preparing a rising and of hiding gold in the mountains, and both Christophe and Dessalines had an interest in painting him as too soft to be trusted. Brunet summoned him to Le Cap to discuss administration. The ruse worked, he was seized without ceremony and shipped to France, and Leclerc promoted Brunet to acting general of division for it. Toussaint was held in solitary confinement in the fortress of Joux in the Jura and interrogated about the legendary treasure until he died on 7 April 1803. The work holds his captors directly responsible for the death whether or not he was poisoned, and argues the arrest backfired, since removing him rekindled rather than ended resistance.

Johnson catalogues factual errors in published textbooks and corrects them directly. One survey claimed that Bonaparte attempted to reinstitute slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1800, and she points out that the expedition he sent did not land until 1802 and lost to the revolutionaries in 1803. Alongside this she corrects a claim that the colony held nearly one million enslaved people, saying the number was closer to five hundred thousand at the start of the revolution. She also objects to describing Boukman Dutty as a poet delivering a call to revolution in a Haitian French patois, arguing he should be identified as a Vodou priest who most likely spoke Haitian Creole, and to using the word mulatto for the whole category of free people of colour, which she says misrepresents current scholarship. Where this account departs from the standard one: Johnson explicitly corrects published world history textbooks that date Bonaparte's move against emancipation to 1800 and that inflate the enslaved population to a million.

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.

The decree offered to fund the return of black and mixed race refugees from the revolution who were stranded in the United States for want of means, and allotted American captains forty gourdes for each person carried to Haiti. It ordered that the text be printed, published and posted, and that a copy go directly to Congress. The article singles this document out because its French does not meet educated standards and because the two American papers that ran it produced different readings of the same sentence, suggesting editors struggling with difficult handwriting or unclear meaning. No secretary signed it. Whether the wording is Dessalines's own or that of an imperfectly schooled secretary, the article reads it as a trace of Haitian leaders seizing print before their relationship to Western literacy was settled, and as an expression of sympathy for black people living in a slaveholding country.