Fouchard says Louverture's refusal is why Napoleon sold Louisiana

Fouchard sets out a claim he insists is a historical fact ignored by American historians. France held Louisiana, from which Bonaparte could have launched an invasion to prevent the consolidation of the American federation, but the plan required the help of Louverture, who had forty thousand trained soldiers in the Caribbean. Louverture chose to fight for the independence of his own territory instead, which left Bonaparte with no means of carrying out the project and no reason to keep the territory, so he sold it, and Jefferson used the purchase to unify the federation. Fouchard therefore calls Louverture an indirect father of American independence and says it should be taught in American schools, asking whether the merit is withheld because Haitians are Black. He quotes Mary A. Healy to the effect that Louverture's opposition spared the United States a war with France and doubled its territory. Where this account departs from the standard one: Fouchard makes Louverture's refusal to assist Bonaparte the direct cause of the Louisiana sale and therefore of the territorial consolidation of the United States.

Girard accepts that Dessalines did not personally capture the Belairs and then shows what he did afterwards. He wrote to Leclerc stating that he had undeniable evidence that Charles Belair had led the latest insurrection and asking that Charles and his wife be punished. Both were sentenced to death and executed. The article treats this as one instance of a habit rather than an aberration. Denouncing rivals as traitors so that the French would execute or deport them was so common in his correspondence of that year that it amounts to a pattern, and such denunciations were frequent in the intensely competitive politics of the revolution. Personal animus was probably also involved, since Belair had served under his direct command in the spring campaign and had used his relationship with Louverture to appeal against and ignore his orders. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: This directly contradicts the reading in de Young's 1960 article, also in this batch, which argues that Dessalines was faced with a fait accompli and did not seek Belair's death.

Arnaud Andre Roberjot Lartigue, a Creole planter who had fled the colony in 1803 and still expected France to retake the whole island, was appointed agent of the Saint-Domingue government at St Thomas. His actual assignment was narrow: French prize cases and the affairs of French citizens arriving on the Danish island. He went well past it. He put to Governor Muhlenfels the question whether a foreign nation had any right to trade with the revolted of Saint-Domingue and answered it himself, arguing that a revolt of Blacks in part of a colony does not interrupt ownership, that the revolt did not repeal the laws barring foreigners from the colony's ports, and that such trade broke France's treaties. He added a warning of self-interest, that what befalls one government today befalls another tomorrow and every slaveholding power should be prohibiting the traffic.

From this year ministers in Philadelphia began preaching sermons on the first of January, a date that marked both the abolition of the American slave trade and the declaration of Haitian independence four years earlier. Jackson sets the practice against the mass arrival of refugees from Saint-Domingue in American ports through the seventeen nineties, which brought firsthand accounts of the rebel victory at Cap-Francais into black communities, and against Gary Nash's finding that American born black Philadelphians came to think of themselves differently because of the revolution, as part of an Atlantic African people contesting white supremacy. He notes the contrast in the same city, where white Philadelphians had gathered near Independence Hall on 4 July 1804 to celebrate a very different anniversary, and where the conservative reading of Haiti also had its adherents.