Toussaint accepts a safe conduct, is seized, and dies in a Jura cell

Girard calls the capture the one mistake of a long and careful career. Asked by plantation workers to take up their complaints against local French troops, Louverture agreed to meet the officer without an escort on the man's word that he would be safe, and soldiers entered the room and took him. He was shipped to Brest with his family, separated from them, and confined at the Fort de Joux near Besancon. He wrote a long memoir to Bonaparte insisting he had always been France's most loyal ally. Bonaparte did not reply but sent an aide to find out where the gold was hidden, and Louverture answered that exile had cost him more than gold since he had lost his freedom, then said nothing more. His servant, doctor, money, fuel, medals and spurs were taken away in turn. He was found dead on 7 April 1803, and in 1880 his bones were tipped into new fortifications.

The women who had carried the French army through the yellow fever season were killed by it afterwards. They were hanged, bayoneted, burned alive and thrown to fighting dogs. Some of the officers decided that physical suffering was not enough and added a refinement. Women were invited to balls, and in the middle of the evening the music would break off into a funeral march while the coffins of their husbands, brothers and sons were carried in and displayed to them. To diminish what the nursing had proved, it was then put about that black people enjoyed a natural and absolute immunity to the disease. Leclerc's printed thanks stayed on the record all the same, and Haitian women were still producing that page of the official gazette a century and a half later. The claim of immunity arrived after the fact and covered nobody who had died nursing.

The rest of the Guadeloupe flotilla carried on north and reached New York in August 1802 with twelve hundred and eighty four prisoners spread across its ships. The French naval officers described their errand in official language. The mayor of the city was not persuaded, wrote about the great number of black men held aboard the frigate Consolante, and refused permission to land. What happened next was never recorded in one place. Some of the captives died of dysentery in the harbour. Some got ashore and vanished. Some were sold in the United States in defiance of the law. The Consolante had arrived with three hundred people aboard and sailed for Guadeloupe with one hundred and eighty. Four other ships went on to Brest and delivered eight hundred prisoners nobody had managed to sell. Asked why so many names were missing from the rolls, the officers told the minister of the navy that many had died during the crossing.

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.