Healy reads the surrender as a feint timed for the fever season

Healy dates the surrender to the first of May and argues it was only apparent. In her reading Toussaint retired to his estate at Ennery intending to attack again in the autumn, once the summer's yellow fever had done its work on the French. Her evidence is indirect and she says so. Toussaint never criticised Christophe or Dessalines for their defection, and both abandoned the French at the first opportunity and revolted to secure the country's freedom. She had already argued that the Crete-a-Pierrot plan was a deliberate device to hold the French until the fever season, costing Leclerc two thousand men there and five thousand in battle within two months with eight thousand more sick or injured. Arrest by Brunet, which she calls treachery all historians agree on, denied him the chance to prove his intent. Where this account departs from the standard one: Healy dates the surrender to 1 May 1802 and treats it as a planned military ruse rather than a genuine capitulation.

Reviewing Philippe Girard's account of the war of independence, Geggus notes that all historians of Haiti know the Napoleonic army of conquest included a large contingent of soldiers of mixed racial descent driven from Saint-Domingue by Louverture, and that far less well known is the number of prominent free blacks such as Jean-Baptiste Belley and Étienne Mentor who also lobbied the French for his overthrow. Girard is the first to claim that for most of the war non-whites made up the majority of the French forces. Geggus finds the general thesis, that the revolution was not a simple struggle about slavery, race or colonialism, a mixture of the obvious and the tendentious, and thinks the implication that Bonaparte never decided to restore slavery is contradicted by the evidence. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus accepts Girard's finding that non-whites formed the majority of French forces for most of the war of independence but rejects his implication that Bonaparte never decided to restore slavery, and disputes Dubois's description of the Haitian Revolution as profoundly democratic.

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.