Toussaint dies in the Jura still waiting for a hearing

Toussaint died in his cell at the Fort de Joux in April 1803. Bell builds the chapter around the memoir of about seventy-five pages that he dictated there with the help of a French secretary, in which he set out the services he had rendered the government and asked why the recompense was arbitrary arrest, rough handling aboard ship and imprisonment without regard for his rank. The mechanism of his defeat in captivity was silence. What he wanted was a hearing, Bonaparte's judgment on the quarrel between himself and Leclerc, and he pressed for it sometimes with a simplicity that may have been tactical, asking whether a parent seeing two children fight should not find out which was the aggressor. No answer to any of his arguments ever came. Bell reads the memoir as the last exercise of a lifelong method, argument in place of force.

The offer of the supreme command to Dessalines is dated by de Young from the oral testimony of Madame Dessalines to this day, six weeks after the execution of Belair and while the published trial record was still circulating. The article treats this as the fact that breaks the traditional story. Experienced commanders including Clervaux, Petion and Christophe would not plausibly have submitted to a man who had just handed Belair to the French, and the thousand or so sub chiefs of the guerrilla bands, who had been hunted by Dessalines and were bound to the dead man by personal loyalty, would have found the arrangement impossible. Haitians of the period were well informed about the private conduct of prominent men through the network of rumour, so the article assumes they knew what French intelligence knew, that Dessalines had learned of the denunciation only after the fact. Where this account departs from the standard one: Ardouin, Madiou, Saint-Remy and Stoddard treat the offer as evidence of Dessalines's ruthlessness; de Young argues the offer is only intelligible if the betrayal never happened.

General Jean-Louis Ferrand, who had taken command at Santo Domingo in late 1803 after refusing a place on a British ship out, could not defeat the new state militarily but could make its trade dangerous. French privateers, supported by Spanish corsairs under the Franco-Spanish alliance, patrolled the waters around Hispaniola and seized merchants suspected of dealing with the people they called brigands, taking more than a hundred American vessels in two years. Because Ferrand's own position was precarious, prizes were processed in Spanish ports. Ferrer's finding, which Gaffield uses, is that property was often condemned without trial and the ships and their human and other cargo sold, with duties owed to the crown divided among Cuban officials instead. Haiti answered by declaring war on Spain and seizing Spanish vessels for condemnation in Haitian ports. Cuban authorities, meanwhile, preferred to behave as though Haiti did not exist.

Girard tracks the appearance of independence as a stated objective through the rebels' foreign correspondence. In August 1803 Dessalines sent Captain Dufour to the British governor of Jamaica, and in that conversation Dufour named independence as the goal. A letter carried the following month by Geffrard to a Spanish official in Cuba made a similar statement, framing independence as the alternative to a French administration that had offered drownings and shootings in place of the loyalty the population had shown. Girard connects the shift to the resumption of the war between France and Britain, which made French defeat plausible, and to Rochambeau's methods, which destroyed any remaining case for staying French. Dessalines also approached the British government about the colony's political existence. The sequence supports his claim that the aim of a separate state crystallised in the last months of the war rather than at its outset.