A British agent talks trade in Port-au-Prince after independence

The British agent Edward Corbet reached Port-au-Prince in early January, immediately after the formal declaration of independence, and met Dessalines. A second visit to Jeremie in February was inconclusive because the governor of Jamaica would not move on commercial restrictions and Dessalines would not grant enclaves on Haitian soil. Girard uses this to overturn a settled assumption. By the summer the British government at home had agreed to concede most of what Dessalines asked, provided some commercial advantage came with it, and the massacre of the remaining French whites, though known in Britain, was barely mentioned. Interest revived in 1806 and lapsed only because Dessalines was assassinated that year. International recognition, usually presented as unthinkable before the French treaty of 1825, was within reach two decades earlier. Girard treats the missed opening as one of the great might have beens of Haitian diplomacy. Where this account departs from the standard one: The usual account dates the first real prospect of recognition to 1825; Girard shows Britain's home government ready to deal with Dessalines by the summer of 1804, blocked mainly by opinion in Jamaica.

On 4 December 1804 General Louis Ferrand wrote to the Superior Council of Santiago about a ship he had sent to Charleston, South Carolina. Aboard it were people he called black brigands, meaning Haitians his forces had captured. The vessel had come back to Santo Domingo carrying a quantity of rice obtained in the exchange. Ferrand put his revenue at one thousand to twelve hundred gourdes. South Carolina grew rice with enslaved labour and was one of the richest plantation economies in the antebellum United States, so the trade pushed captives into a market that would absorb them and returned a staple food to a colony that grew very little. Ferrand had served in the American Revolution and knew the country he was dealing with. In those same first two years of Haitian independence the United States was Haiti's most important commercial partner, and in 1806 it criminalised that trade. American ports could buy from Haiti and buy Haitians inside the same decade.

On 4 July 1804, six months after the former colony declared itself independent under the name Haiti, several hundred black Philadelphians declined to celebrate the independence of the United States and celebrated the new republic instead. They gathered in the southern part of the city, elected officers, formed themselves into military companies, armed themselves with clubs and swords and marched through the streets, handling roughly any white person who crossed them. On one occasion marchers entered the house of a hostile white onlooker and attacked him and his friends. Philadelphia had the largest free black population in the country and had watched the war on the island for thirteen years through its own newspapers and its own docks. James Forten later told a member of the American Colonization Society that Haiti was proof that black people in America would become a great nation and could not always be held in bondage.

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.