Twenty five thousand people cross the Windward Passage to Cuba

After the French defeat in 1803 most of the remaining white colonists of Saint-Domingue left, and the largest single movement went a short distance east across the Windward Passage. By 1808 more than twenty five thousand people had settled at Baracoa and Santiago de Cuba, in the eastern province of Oriente. They arrived with skills rather than land. They introduced smaller units of production than Cuban planters had been using and greatly extended the growing of coffee, tobacco, cacao and cotton. The later expansion of Cuban sugar owed a good deal to their technical knowledge. Cuban officials welcomed the wealthier arrivals for the capital and the expertise they brought, while ordinary Cubans suspected them of sympathy with the revolution they had run from. Many of the men had spent years in one or another of the armies that fought over Saint-Domingue. In 1809 the Spanish authorities expelled almost all of them, and most sailed for New Orleans.

Under French law a child born outside marriage could not inherit, and a parent was not free to leave property as he wished, being obliged to pass it to legitimate heirs. In the new Haitian state an enormous number of children had no standing under any such rule. On 28 May 1805 Jean-Jacques Dessalines issued a law that removed the distinction. There was to be no preference for children born in wedlock. A child's capacity to inherit turned on recognition by a parent. The measure was designed to settle inheritance disputes before they began. Its effect on marriage ran the other way from what the founders intended. A wedding in Haiti cost a civil licence, a payment to the priest and his assistants, clothes bought for the church, a feast afterwards and several days away from work. Once children could inherit without one, the expense had lost its point, and legal marriage stayed rare for the next two centuries.

On 18 August 1807 a woman called Louise dite Letort came into a notary's office in Santo Domingo city carrying a manumission act from the year 1739. The clerk recorded it as extremely damaged. It had freed her and her mother Rose sixty eight years earlier, and it stood between her and a government that was putting people back into slavery. She was not alone in making that calculation. Henriette dite Pommeau deposited papers on 28 June 1805 reconstructing a manumission granted around 1787, after losing her originals when rebels destroyed her home town. Margueritte Bonne went to a notary in Le Cap in December 1801 to certify an act of 1790 whose copy had burned in the great fire there in June 1793, then carried that certificate to Santiago and deposited it in August 1803. Freedom in this colony depended on whether a sheet of paper had survived a fire, a war and a sea crossing.

De Young singles out a letter from Dessalines to Leclerc held in the Rochambeau collection at the University of Florida. In it Dessalines specifies aggressive military actions taken in his department by himself and his lieutenants and mentions a supporting action by one of his officers, Commandant Gabart, assisting Commandant Petion on his own orders. The letter matters because of what surrounds it. Three days later Leclerc ordered the arrest of Dessalines and wrote to the first consul that Maurepas and Dessalines were deeply involved in the disasters overtaking the French forces. De Young's reading is that French intelligence had begun to see the general not as an officer executing the most hateful commands of his commander but as a patriot building the military basis of the coming war of independence while appearing to serve.