The soldiers who were nursed hang the women who nursed them

The women who had carried the French army through the yellow fever season were killed by it afterwards. They were hanged, bayoneted, burned alive and thrown to fighting dogs. Some of the officers decided that physical suffering was not enough and added a refinement. Women were invited to balls, and in the middle of the evening the music would break off into a funeral march while the coffins of their husbands, brothers and sons were carried in and displayed to them. To diminish what the nursing had proved, it was then put about that black people enjoyed a natural and absolute immunity to the disease. Leclerc's printed thanks stayed on the record all the same, and Haitian women were still producing that page of the official gazette a century and a half later. The claim of immunity arrived after the fact and covered nobody who had died nursing.

Captain Sangowski was ordered to meet two French detachments at the Saint George plantation and fortify it. Knowing little French, he understood his objective to be Port Margot. He forced his guide past the rendezvous into unfamiliar country, halted at nightfall on an unfortified estate, and was surrounded. His men carried thirty cartridges instead of the usual sixty to travel light. When ammunition ran out he had the guide shot for supposed treachery and then bargained away his soldiers' weapons in exchange for a release that was never honoured. The captured legionnaires were tied to trees, mutilated and killed while Sangowski watched from a reed bog. He was pulled out with pneumonia, debriefed and died at Borgne before a court martial could sit. Brunet's report blamed him alone, but the work argues the French chain of command shared responsibility for issuing orders it knew could not be understood.

On 27 April 1800 Toussaint got the French commissioner Roume to sign an order authorising him to take possession of Spanish Santo Domingo. Bell stresses the verb. The order was extracted rather than received, part of a pattern in which Toussaint obtained French legal cover for decisions he had already made. The mechanism was the dormant Treaty of Basel, which had transferred the eastern colony to France in 1795 and had never been executed for want of troops. Acting on it gave Toussaint the whole island, closed the land route by which enslaved people were still being trafficked from the Spanish side, and removed the last territory where a rival authority could shelter. It also alarmed Paris, since a governor who could annex a neighbouring colony on his own initiative was plainly beyond correction by decree.

The third document the article prints is Repussard's report of the capture. Ordered by General Jablonowski to place himself under Dessalines at Petite Riviere, he divided his guardsmen into two columns and marched into the Cahos, taking the left column himself. Near Corail Mauger he surprised Belair's brother in law hidden in a ravine, questioned him without result, then searched the woods and found Madame Belair concealed by a clump of tall grass. Setting off with her towards the post where Belair was said to be entrenched, he found that Belair, seeing his wife taken, rode out and surrendered. Repussard delivered the couple to Dessalines a league away. He also complained of a strict order not to open fire, which de Young reads as evidence either that Dessalines wanted to leave Belair an escape or that the prisoner was wanted alive for questioning. Where this account departs from the standard one: Classical historians have Dessalines hunting Belair down and betraying him; this report shows the capture made by an outside national guard unit sent on Jablonowski's orders, after a denunciation written three weeks earlier by an officer who was not Dessalines.