Peace with Britain returns Martinique and restores slavery by decree

The treaty that ended the war with Britain also returned Martinique to France, an island where slavery had never been abolished. Daut shows the trap this set. Bonaparte could either admit a slave colony back into a republic that had abolished slavery or abolish it there. In May he resolved the contradiction the other way, decreeing that in colonies returned under the treaty slavery would be maintained according to the laws in force before 1789, and permitting the slave trade to resume. Daut treats this as the moment the incoherence inside French republicanism stopped being implicit. The measure had gone before the tribunal before it was formally adopted, so it was not a private act of a dictator but a decision of the French state. The Leclerc expedition had already sailed for Saint-Domingue in anticipation, which is why Haitian writers read the treaty as the announcement of a reconquest.

A few days before the battle of Crete-a-Pierrot, Dessalines was at Petite-Riviere de l'Artibonite where French residents were being killed in reprisal. Two young Frenchmen ran to Claire Heureuse and begged for their lives. She told them to hide under a bed and went to receive her husband, who came in from the field with Bazelais, Laurette, Lamartiniere and Lafortune. A sneeze from the next room gave the men away. One was cut down at once. Claire Heureuse went on her knees, called on the other officers to help her, and told her husband that the survivor was a doctor who might be useful to him one day. She held on to his tunic and let herself be dragged the length of the room until he gave way. The man was Michel Etienne Descourtilz, who later published his Voyage d'un naturaliste and an eight volume flora of the Antilles, and who admitted in print that he owed his life to her.

Louverture had pressed Roume for months to authorise a takeover of the Spanish half of the island, accusing his neighbours of kidnapping black Dominguians and staging public demonstrations to manufacture outrage. When the Spanish governor investigated and gave assurances, Roume withdrew his earlier decree. Louverture then imprisoned the French agent and invaded anyway, on hearing that Paris was about to forbid it. Girard's finding concerns what did not happen next. The documents Louverture published to justify the invasion say nothing about the fate of Dominican slaves, and the proclamations he issued on the march promised to respect his neighbours' religion, lives and property. During the handover negotiations he complained that Dominican exiles were leaving with their slaves, on the ground that this stripped the territory of workers. He treats the silence of the record as the finding, since a governor eager to be seen abolishing slavery would have said so in print. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard says the record is far from clear that Louverture abolished slavery in Santo Domingo after invading, contradicting the common assertion that he did so at once.

Thomas uses the Logan Bill of 1806 as the test of his argument, and the test is the timing. Under Toussaint, stability and a refusal to declare independence had calmed the fears of the southern planter class and preserved American support. Dessalines's open declaration in 1804 and the violence he carried out against the remaining white planters tipped the balance against American tolerance of the emancipation threat, and the embargo legislation followed. The mechanism Thomas describes is a slaveholding republic reacting to the demonstration effect rather than to Haitian conduct abroad. He notes that Jefferson's position had moved repeatedly across two decades, that the prospect of Louisiana settlement would have nearly doubled American plantation capacity, and that Jefferson sided with economic interest in weighing the value of slavery to the southern economy.