Rainsford argues an independent Haiti threatens nobody

Captain Marcus Rainsford of the West India regiment published a thirty-page memoir in January 1802 recounting his misadventures in Santo Domingo in 1799, when a hurricane forced his ship into port, he met Toussaint, played billiards with him, was arrested as a suspected spy, condemned by a military jury and then released on Toussaint's intervention. Pierrot notes that the book ran against the grain at the moment of publication, when English opinion supported the Leclerc expedition. Rainsford argued that an independent Haiti posed no threat to British colonies, that the revolutionaries had no wish to attack them, and that the French expedition would fail for logistical and moral reasons. The mechanism of the book's limitation is that it defended Toussaint as an individual rather than the political force behind him, which is the separation Pierrot's whole argument tracks.

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.

With the French expedition days from landing and still convinced that Jefferson wholeheartedly supported its mission, Secretary of State Madison instructed the American commercial agent at Cap to adopt a policy of strict neutrality. Girard spells out what the phrase meant in practice. The agent was to make no effort to combat American contraband reaching the rebels. The misunderstanding, he writes, created much acrimony after the French landing, and it fits his larger argument that the expedition's supply arrangements were built on assurances that quietly dissolved. Jefferson's second thoughts had come too late to matter for the sailing, since the largest squadron in the French navy was already preparing to leave Brest and Bonaparte would never have accepted the independence of the most valuable French colony under Anglo-American tutelage. Girard reads the episode as the first sign that the supply arrangements underpinning the whole expedition rested on promises no one intended to police.

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.