Leclerc writes his last letter with most of his army dead

Bell dates Leclerc's final dispatch to 7 October 1802. By the time it arrived in France its author was dead, along with roughly fifty thousand of the eighty thousand troops sent to subdue the rebellion in Saint Domingue. The mechanism was disease compounded by policy. Yellow fever destroyed European regiments faster than reinforcement could replace them, while the decision to disarm the black population and the news that slavery had been restored in Guadeloupe drove the colonial troops who had joined the French back into the insurrection. Bell closes the ledger with an irony he lets stand on its own: outmanoeuvred and imprisoned, Toussaint nevertheless outlived the man who took him, hanging on in the cold cell until April 1803. Bell lets the reversal stand without comment, because the numbers make the argument for him. An expedition assembled to restore an empire had instead delivered the colony to the men it came to destroy,.

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.

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.

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.