The last French sail from the Mole where Columbus had anchored

After the battle Dessalines fought against Rochambeau at Vertieres, the French capitulated, and on 29 November the Army of Independence entered Cap-Francais in triumph. Bellegarde then closes the circle deliberately: the final French regiments left from Mole Saint-Nicolas, the bay where Columbus had anchored on 6 December 1492 and where the first Christian ceremony in the New World was performed. The symmetry is the point of the paragraph, three centuries of European possession of the island beginning and ending at the same anchorage. His arithmetic does not hold, since the interval is three hundred and eleven years and the printed figure gives four hundred and eleven, but the framing shows how a mid-century Haitian diplomat wanted the war of independence understood abroad: not as a colonial revolt but as the reversal of the European conquest of the Americas at its original point of entry. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

General Louis Ferrand governed the eastern side of Hispaniola from Santo Domingo city after France lost the western side to the Haitians. On 6 January 1805 he issued an order allowing anyone living near the Haitian border to cross into Haiti and take prisoner any Haitian under fourteen years of age. Whoever seized the captive owned the captive. Girls under twelve and boys under ten could never be sent back, and could be attached to a plantation or sold outright. His commandant Joseph Ruiz and other trusted officers were given the job of issuing certificates that recorded who owned each captive and stated that the capture had happened in territory held by rebels. In a letter to Ruiz, Ferrand set out the other half of the policy. Haitian males over fourteen found in Santo Domingo were to be shot. Haiti had declared its independence one year earlier. Its neighbour across an inland border was now running slaving raids on Haitian children with the forms filled in.

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.

Louverture reached Brest in July 1802 and was not moved to the fortress of Joux on the Swiss frontier until early August, while his wife and sons were sent to Bayonne. Woodward gives April 1803 for his death in the text and dates it precisely under an accompanying illustration. He names tuberculosis as what killed him and adds that the body was never returned to the country he had fought to liberate. The separation of the family was itself part of the mechanism, since the two sons had been educated in Paris and had earlier been used as leverage on their father. Woodward pairs the death with what was happening in the colony at the same moment, where decrees from Bonaparte's government stripped free men of colour of their rights and restored slavery, driving black and mulatto commanders into a single alliance against the French. Where this account departs from the standard one: Woodward attributes the death to tuberculosis, where most accounts of the Fort de Joux imprisonment describe pneumonia, cold and deliberate neglect.