Warned of invasion, Louverture reassures whites, not the masses

When Louverture learned that Bonaparte had sent an expedition to retake the colony and restore slavery, he did not declare independence, call the population to arms, or make the French planters choose between leaving and defending the new order. He kept order and told the whites that they and their property were safe. James held that he should have explained the situation to the masses, that what they thought mattered more than what the imperialists thought, and that leaving them in the dark drove them away at the decisive moment. Dupuy accepts the description and rejects the explanation. Dessalines, who represented the nationalist faction, made no attempt to reassure anyone, had been convinced of the need for independence long before the fleet arrived, and reduced the conflict to whites against Blacks rather than owners against labourers, which is why his alternative could be carried out once Louverture was removed.

Maurepas was one of Toussaint Louverture's officers and commanded the department of the Northwest. In 1802 his wife shared his end. In the channel between Tortuga and the mainland the whole family was hoisted and hung from the great yards of a ship and flogged until they died, and the bodies were then thrown into the sea. The account records that Madame Maurepas spent the time urging her husband and her children to die like heroes rather than complaining. The same pages list Madame Chevalier, who put the noose around her own neck on the deck of the Duquesne, Madame Paul Louverture, taken by night with her children and drowned in the roadstead of Cap, and Louise Rateau, who kept a house in Port-au-Prince where men plotting against Rochambeau could meet. General Leclerc wrote to Napoleon that it had to be seen with what spirit both men and women went to meet death.

Lartigue accused Dessalines of sending emissaries to St Thomas to raise the Danish islands, and later described a plan to descend on Martinique and Guadeloupe, kill the inhabitants, burn the towns, raise the enslaved and free people of colour and form fourteen regiments. Gaffield traces the chain. An Englishman named Yong told him that at Jacmel General Moreau had said Haiti expected news at any moment that the enslaved of the French islands had risen. From that Lartigue concluded Dessalines was organising the risings, and he began describing passing travellers of colour as emissaries and their meeting place as a Haitian club. Gaffield notes the motive: on 25 September Lartigue had written acknowledging Ferrand's complaint that he had so far been of no use. Geggus treats the expedition as a rumour spread by a colonist; Jenson thinks there is too much smoke for no fire. Where this account departs from the standard one: Gaffield argues the conspiracy theory that Dessalines was exporting revolution originated in one agent's need to prove his own usefulness, and she sets Geggus's dismissal against Jenson's partial defence of it.

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.