A French general denies that shipwrecked children were sold into slavery

On 10 October 1802 General Francois Kerverseau, Napoleon's senior representative in Santo Domingo, published a proclamation to kill a story going round the colony. Several black and mixed race children had been put ashore from a French vessel named Le Berceau, and people were saying they had been sold as slaves with his blessing. Kerverseau insisted no sale had been authorised and promised that any official who approved one would be removed at once. He asked the town to distrust the people spreading the story and to trust instead those who watched over them while they slept. The timing explains the urgency. Napoleon's expedition had reached the island at the start of that year, and by autumn word was travelling that its real purpose was to put slavery back. France had already restored slavery in Guadeloupe. Anyone freed by the French emancipation law of 1794 had reason to read the arrival of Le Berceau as a warning.

When the Indigenous army was close to breaking under Bonaparte's expedition, Fouchard says it was the maroons who were still in the field and who pushed the generals out of their inertia. During the truce that followed the deportation of Louverture they carried on alone, raiding, burning, sabotaging and sniping, and he cites Christophe's own admission of this to General Pamphile de Lacroix. He names Sylla, Sans Souci and Boukman as the maroon leaders who showed the way. His account of the method is specific: with fewer men than the enemy, victory came from poisoning the rivers, destroying roads and bridges, and burning everything until the last invader had gone. Two centuries of guerrilla practice were what allowed the regular troops to finish the job, and the army that had won in Italy and Egypt left fifty thousand dead behind. Fouchard credits Louverture, Dessalines, Petion and Christophe, and above all the maroons. Where this account departs from the standard one: Fouchard makes the maroons rather than the regular Indigenous army the decisive force in the war of independence.

The women who had carried the French army through the yellow fever season were killed by it afterwards. They were hanged, bayoneted, burned alive and thrown to fighting dogs. Some of the officers decided that physical suffering was not enough and added a refinement. Women were invited to balls, and in the middle of the evening the music would break off into a funeral march while the coffins of their husbands, brothers and sons were carried in and displayed to them. To diminish what the nursing had proved, it was then put about that black people enjoyed a natural and absolute immunity to the disease. Leclerc's printed thanks stayed on the record all the same, and Haitian women were still producing that page of the official gazette a century and a half later. The claim of immunity arrived after the fact and covered nobody who had died nursing.

Pierrot tracks the racial vocabulary the Times of London used for Toussaint and finds it moving with events. For years the paper used black, negro and mulatto more or less at random, but after the Leclerc expedition sailed the descriptions hardened. An article of 1 October 1803 implied that Toussaint could neither read nor write and had been selected by white people as a fit instrument for their escape from persecution, while presenting Dessalines, mistakenly, as a freeborn mulatto of brutal disposition. The mechanism is a transfer of agency. As an active general Toussaint might be granted some white blood, and once defeated and imprisoned he became wholly black and wholly dependent on white direction, at which point the new leader of the revolution acquired the mixed ancestry that had been withdrawn from his predecessor.