The French leave Cap Francais without signing a surrender

Dessalines and the adjutant commander of the French forces signed terms giving the French army ten days to quit the last stronghold in the colony, guaranteeing the safety of white inhabitants who chose to stay and arranging passage for those who left. Gaffield's point is what the document omits. It transferred the forts and the war materiel and it moved the troops, but it did not concede defeat or acknowledge any change of title. That silence let France go on describing itself as the lawful authority and the new state as a belligerent colony in revolt, and it removed the instrument that had settled the American case, since Britain had acknowledged United States independence in a treaty. Without an equivalent document, foreign governments were left choosing between the sovereignty France still claimed in law and the sovereignty Dessalines held in fact, which is the bind the whole book examines. Corroborated by 3 works in the library.

Commodore Cumberland stationed the frigate Pique off the harbour, put brigs in the channel to Isle a Vache and told his indigenous allies to bring up small craft. Hunger did the rest. The garrison ate diseased mules, the dead were carted into the sea nightly, and men foraging at the O'Shiell farm died eating poisonous plants. Brunet's council of war rejected evacuation to Cartagena as suicide and negotiated. Cumberland conceded military honours but insisted the whole garrison become prisoners of war, seized every vessel in port as spoil, and blocked the civilian exodus he had promised to assist. Twenty-five Polish officers and 231 other ranks went into captivity, their pay certified by Malachowski's administrative bureau on the way out. The British handed the town to the insurgents within a day or two, and Dessalines, learning of its fall, turned north toward Le Cap. Where this account departs from the standard one: The work weighs the Polish memoirists against Madiou and concludes that Lux and Wierzbicki embellished the massacre they reported at Les Cayes, since Madiou records that persons and property were respected when the southern army entered.

In 1803 the American wax artists Davenport and Bishop toured a collection of figures that included the black general Toussaint, described as the late governor of the colony and modelled from an existing painting. Wax was the most lifelike medium of the age, imitating flesh better than any other material, and figures were built at full size with real hair and appropriate clothing. Shows ran in taverns, hotels and rented rooms at low prices, drew large crowds, and this itinerary crossed the line between free and slave states, taking in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Rhode Island. White stresses what the billing does. Louverture is called only by his first name and placed down the list between a local beauty and a moral scene rather than among the white revolutionary luminaries, yet he is presented as a commander, which cut directly against French policy at that moment.

Henriette Saint-Marc was known in Port-au-Prince as a quiet and respectable woman who walked with her eyes down past the barracks of the old regiments of Artois, Guyenne and Normandy. When the generals at Arcahaie ran short of powder and shot she began obtaining both from French soldiers, by whatever means were available to her, and she was one of many women doing it. Pamphile de Lacroix, who wrote the history of the Leclerc expedition, confirms that the guerrillas were supplied this way. One evening in December 1802, on the slope of the morne de Desprez, the officer paying court to her turned out to be an agent of the maréchaussée who had been watching her for weeks. He put irons on her wrists and took her to the Artois barracks. A quick court martial sentenced her to hang. She was executed the next day on the square in front of the cathedral. That evening Rochambeau's palace held a ball with illuminations and speeches.