Toussaint's house is stripped on the day he is seized

Toussaint Louverture was taken in Brunet's ambush on 7 June 1802. Brunet's aide de camp went straight to the general's house and emptied it of money, jewellery and papers. Of everything the family owned, Suzanne Louverture saved a single object, her husband's watch, engraved with the words that his virtue had opened every heart to him, his initials beneath, and a second line saying that he never knew the prejudice of colour. At the same hour a battalion commander named Pesquidon reached the property where she was living. She saw her son Isaac being brought in between two lines of soldiers, ran to him and asked where his father was. Pesquidon told her she would be given an escort so that she could join her husband. She agreed at once and left with her sons and with Louise Chancy, Toussaint's niece. The people of Ennery crowded the house begging the soldiers not to kill her or her children.

After independence, successive Haitian governments commissioned privateers of their own and turned them against the traffic in people. Some of these vessels carried names that announced the purpose. One was the Wilberforce, after the British campaigner against the slave trade. One was the Abolition de la Traite, meaning abolition of the trade. A third was the Philanthrope. They went after slaving ships making for Jamaica and Cuba. Captives taken out of those ships were brought to Haiti, where the constitution granted citizenship to anyone of African descent who arrived. They were then set to work under the labour system the Haitian state had inherited from the colony, which tied cultivators to estates and required them to stay. The men who commissioned these ships were answering the French commander in Santo Domingo, who was seizing young Haitians for sale abroad. Haiti was at once a refuge from the Atlantic trade and a state that still wanted field hands.

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.

Pierrot tracks the racial vocabulary the Times of London used for Toussaint and finds it moving with events. For years the paper used black, negro and mulatto more or less at random, but after the Leclerc expedition sailed the descriptions hardened. An article of 1 October 1803 implied that Toussaint could neither read nor write and had been selected by white people as a fit instrument for their escape from persecution, while presenting Dessalines, mistakenly, as a freeborn mulatto of brutal disposition. The mechanism is a transfer of agency. As an active general Toussaint might be granted some white blood, and once defeated and imprisoned he became wholly black and wholly dependent on white direction, at which point the new leader of the revolution acquired the mixed ancestry that had been withdrawn from his predecessor.