The widow Cotin treats French soldiers with wine, nutmeg and egg

With the white population abandoning the sick and the army's own remedies useless, women of Saint-Domingue nursed the French through the yellow fever epidemic using what they knew themselves. They climbed into the mountains to gather the herbs they thought would check the disease and brewed them as infusions. One of them, known as the widow Cotin, did so much that she was called the benefactress of the human race. Her treatment was three glasses of red wine holding a nutmeg and an egg yolk, both baked under ashes and powdered, which brought on heavy sweating. When patients died anyway the women paid for proper funerals and walked behind the coffins, in a season when bodies were being thrown into the sea. The army lost seven hundred of its own doctors. General Leclerc was obliged to thank these women publicly and to print his admiration in the official gazette of Saint-Domingue. Most of them had been enslaved a year or two earlier.

Girard fixes the composition window precisely. Toussaint arrived at Fort de Joux on 24 August 1802 and asked for writing materials at once; the prison commander Baille supplied them against instructions. Within two months the prisoner wrote eight letters in his own hand, the most intense period of writing in his life. The memoir was produced between his arrival and 17 September, when Caffarelli came from Paris for a series of interviews and took the text away with him. Girard identifies four manuscripts: two secretarial drafts, a copy in Toussaint's own hand of twenty-one pages in small script, and a fair copy signed for the First Consul. Caffarelli's report shows the text was dictated to Jeannin, a clerk of the Pontarlier prefecture, who acted only as a copyist while Toussaint reread and corrected.

On 27 April 1800 Toussaint got the French commissioner Roume to sign an order authorising him to take possession of Spanish Santo Domingo. Bell stresses the verb. The order was extracted rather than received, part of a pattern in which Toussaint obtained French legal cover for decisions he had already made. The mechanism was the dormant Treaty of Basel, which had transferred the eastern colony to France in 1795 and had never been executed for want of troops. Acting on it gave Toussaint the whole island, closed the land route by which enslaved people were still being trafficked from the Spanish side, and removed the last territory where a rival authority could shelter. It also alarmed Paris, since a governor who could annex a neighbouring colony on his own initiative was plainly beyond correction by decree.

The third document the article prints is Repussard's report of the capture. Ordered by General Jablonowski to place himself under Dessalines at Petite Riviere, he divided his guardsmen into two columns and marched into the Cahos, taking the left column himself. Near Corail Mauger he surprised Belair's brother in law hidden in a ravine, questioned him without result, then searched the woods and found Madame Belair concealed by a clump of tall grass. Setting off with her towards the post where Belair was said to be entrenched, he found that Belair, seeing his wife taken, rode out and surrendered. Repussard delivered the couple to Dessalines a league away. He also complained of a strict order not to open fire, which de Young reads as evidence either that Dessalines wanted to leave Belair an escape or that the prisoner was wanted alive for questioning. Where this account departs from the standard one: Classical historians have Dessalines hunting Belair down and betraying him; this report shows the capture made by an outside national guard unit sent on Jablonowski's orders, after a denunciation written three weeks earlier by an officer who was not Dessalines.