Leclerc orders every worker back to the estate they left since 1791

Having reorganised the civil administration and created a National Guard recruited from citizens with assets above seven hundred francs, Leclerc turned to production. He kept Toussaint's system of compulsory cultivation in exchange for a quarter share of revenue and superseded the earlier proclamation of 8 February with a decree ordering the return of all workers who had abandoned plantations since 1791. Only soldiers absorbed into his own army were exempt, and men from disbanded units were sent to the fields. Local military officers policed the scheme, exactly as under the previous regime. Export earnings that year were substantial, with sugar bringing 53.4 million francs and coffee 35.37 million, which made the policy look successful on paper. The work argues the decree was self-defeating, since compulsion administered by white officers read as the first instalment of restored slavery and helped detonate the general rising of August and September.

Slavery had never been abolished in Martinique, because a British occupation kept the French emancipation law of 1794 from ever taking effect there. When Britain returned the island under the peace of Amiens in September 1802, France recovered a colony where the old system was still running and where British ships had kept the traffic from Africa going right through the war. French traders resumed at once. The first two French slaving vessels arrived in October, a month after the handover. By April 1803 French and British ships together had landed two thousand nine hundred people there. The contrast with Saint-Domingue is the point. In the larger colony the black population was armed and numerous, and French commanders kept postponing any public restoration of slavery. In Martinique nothing had to be restored. The traffic picked up where the war had interrupted it, under a French flag instead of a British one.

Leclerc, looking for a pretext after the surrender, stationed five hundred soldiers near Louverture's estate at Ennery and waited. Trouble between those troops and local people gave Louverture reason to ask that they be withdrawn, and Leclerc replied that General Brunet would come to discuss it. Instead Leclerc instructed Brunet to invite Louverture to headquarters and arrest him there. Woodward records that Louverture had been warned of the plan and went anyway, at night, to the Georges plantation. While he waited for Brunet to come back into the room, French soldiers seized him and put him aboard the frigate La Creole. He was carried to Le Cap, transferred to the Heros where his family joined him, and sailed for Brest. The whole sequence, Woodward argues, followed the secret instructions Bonaparte had given Leclerc before the fleet left France.

On 2 February 1803 the Morning Post in London published Wordsworth's sonnet to Toussaint Louverture. Pierrot concedes that it has been read as an early example of British sympathy for the Haitian cause and argues that it carries the same ambivalence found across the period's writing. The sympathy arrives at the moment its object is languishing in a cell at the Fort de Joux, entirely without power. The poem urges the soldier to keep a cheerful brow in bondage and to take comfort in the thought that nature rather than humankind will remember him, and it replaces his troops and his actual friends with abstract emotions and natural elements. The mechanism is a sublime turn away from political nation toward self and race, which designates Toussaint a literary figure and strips him of any connection to a people.