The Third Polish Battalion lands at Borgne already short by a fifth

Brunet's Right Northern Division was holding a coastline and a mountainous interior with 4,288 men and had lost a battalion commander trying to reopen broken communications, so his chief of staff Thouvenot demanded a thousand of the incoming replacements. The Polish battalion that arrived at Borgne was commanded by Franciszek Grabski, aged fifty-seven and in poor health, after its designated commander pleaded old age at fifty and stayed in Livorno. Of the promised twenty-one officers and 768 soldiers, 634 disembarked fit for duty. Brunet complained immediately, though the reinforcement still raised his division's strength by a quarter. The companies were split up at once across Gros Morne, Cotes de Terre, Chapelle, Limbe and the hospital at Borgne. That dispersal, combined with officers who could barely make themselves understood in French, produced the communication failures that destroyed a company three weeks later.

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.

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.

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.