Three months of war end in a French prison cell for Louverture

When Bonaparte received news of the 1801 constitution he sent a large military mission under his brother-in-law to restore metropolitan control and to co-opt, expel or eliminate Louverture and the generals under his command. After three months of fighting, known as the three months war, Louverture surrendered, was trapped and deported to France, and died in prison at Fort de Joux. The editors state the causal chain without hedging: promulgating the constitution provoked the events that finally led to the creation of the Haitian state and to the drafting of its first national constitution. Resistance to the French army continued after the deportation, and under Dessalines the country won an independence formally declared on the first of January 1804. The editors also record what the constitution had formalised in the meantime, describing it as extending a structure of governance already essentially in place under his rule.

On 6 January 1805 General Jean Louis Ferrand, commanding the French remnant in Santo Domingo, issued an order sanctioning the seizure and enslavement of Haitians. Haiti had declared independence one year earlier. Jean Jacques Dessalines answered in February with an expedition of twenty thousand men against Santo Domingo city, which failed when a French naval squadron under Admiral Missiessy arrived at the right moment and the British declined to help him. In an address to his citizens on 12 April 1805 Dessalines named Ferrand's decree as a reason for the invasion, accused the Spanish side of assisting French designs, and told Haitians to live or die as free people. He had copies of the January order distributed so that people could read it themselves. Emilio Cordero Michel later argued that the decree was indeed the main cause of the campaign, since it showed that Ferrand intended to retake Haiti and restore slavery there as he had in the east.

Governor Nugent sent Corbet, who had negotiated with black leaders for a decade, to Haiti aboard the Tartare in early January. His report to Kingston states that he is laying before the governor a declaration of independence he says was composed while he was there, or shortly before his arrival at Port-au-Prince, and which he could not present earlier. The article treats this as decisive against the received chronology. It does not settle which part of the Acte Corbet carried, but it contradicts the claim that the full text was drafted overnight on New Year's Eve and published throughout Haiti on 1 January, while confirming that something was in print by the second half of January. The article connects a Charleston news item of 23 February about a proclamation received at Kingston to the same report. Where this account departs from the standard one: Directly contradicts Madiou's account of a single night of composition by Boisrond-Tonnerre followed by nationwide proclamation on 1 January 1804.

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.