News of a dead general in Haiti puts Louisiana on the market

When Bonaparte learned that Leclerc was dead and the Saint-Domingue campaign was beyond saving, he stopped sending reinforcements, cancelled the orders for the Louisiana expedition, and offered the territory to the United States. Girard makes the causal chain explicit and unsentimental. Louisiana had been acquired to supply the sugar colonies with flour and timber, so with the largest of those colonies lost there was no longer any point in holding a source of food. The people who defeated France in the Caribbean were pursuing their own aims and had no interest in North America, yet their victory is what enlarged the United States. He adds that French officers spent 1803 begging neighbours for help instead of invading them, one sent to Cuba for loans and dogs trained to hunt people, others to Jamaica and to 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.

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.

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.