Toussaint is walled into the innermost cell of the Fort de Joux

Toussaint was carried across France in a closed coach under heavy escort, held in a prison at Besancon during the night of 22 August 1802, then moved at two in the morning into the dungeon of the Fort de Joux. Bell describes the choice as deliberate policy. Leclerc had written home that Toussaint could not be kept too far from the sea nor in too sure a prison, and the ninth-century chateau in the Jura, ringed by five walls and three moats, is about as far from any port as French territory allows. His cell lay behind five heavy double doors at the end of a vaulted corridor, twenty feet by twelve, its window embrasure bricked up so that light came only through a grille at the top. The mountains around it carry snow eight months in twelve.

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.

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.