A Capuchin is procured to crown Dessalines as Jacques the First

Having rid Haiti of everyone he counted an enemy, Dessalines on 8 October 1804 procured a Capuchin missionary to crown him emperor under the name of Jacques the First. Wood then summarises the constitution associated with the new empire: slavery abolished, equality of rank, equal operation of the laws, inviolability of property, freedom of worship, marriage made a civil contract, houses held inviolable, the general name of blacks adopted for all Haitians regardless of actual skin colour, and white men barred from acquiring property of any kind. It further declared that nobody could be considered worthy of the name Haitian who was not a good father, son, husband and soldier. The empire was divided into six military divisions, each under a general answerable to no one but the emperor. Bellegarde dates the imperial proclamation to September 1804. Where this account departs from the standard one: Wood puts the coronation on 8 October 1804, while Bellegarde in this same batch dates the proclamation of the empire to September 1804.

Jean-Francois and Georges Biassou led the enslaved insurgents of northern Saint-Domingue in the early 1790s and granted liberty to people who served under them. On 8 November 1804 General Louis Ferrand wrote to his subordinate Peralta and cancelled all of it. He insisted that neither man had ever held the right to liberate anybody, so every French black or coloured person freed by either of them held no valid claim to freedom and was to be treated as a slave. In the same letter he made one exception. Former Spanish slaves who had received their liberty from the King of Spain for service in colonial armies would keep it. The distinction turns on whose signature counts. A monarch could make a free person out of an enslaved one. A black general at the head of an army could not, whatever paper he issued and whatever the person had done to earn it. Many people in Santo Domingo held their freedom on exactly that kind of paper.

Toussaint Louverture was taken in Brunet's ambush on 7 June 1802. Brunet's aide de camp went straight to the general's house and emptied it of money, jewellery and papers. Of everything the family owned, Suzanne Louverture saved a single object, her husband's watch, engraved with the words that his virtue had opened every heart to him, his initials beneath, and a second line saying that he never knew the prejudice of colour. At the same hour a battalion commander named Pesquidon reached the property where she was living. She saw her son Isaac being brought in between two lines of soldiers, ran to him and asked where his father was. Pesquidon told her she would be given an escort so that she could join her husband. She agreed at once and left with her sons and with Louise Chancy, Toussaint's niece. The people of Ennery crowded the house begging the soldiers not to kill her or her children.

The Louverture family reached Brest after twenty five days at sea and was then broken up on Napoleon's orders. Toussaint went to the Fort de Joux in the Jura. His son Placide was taken to Belle-Ile. His nephew and aide de camp Chancy was interned at Toulon. Suzanne Louverture, her son Isaac, her youngest son Saint-Jean and Louise Chancy were sent to Bayonne and from there to Agen, with nothing, since they had been allowed to carry nothing away. On 8 January 1804 Saint-Jean died there of a wasting illness at the age of thirteen, having said that he could not survive his father. Toussaint had already been dead nine months. One week earlier, at Gonaives, Dessalines had declared the independence of Haiti. A letter of 6 October from the French general Vincent, a friend of the family, records that Suzanne Louverture's reason had begun to give way.