A decree splits the whole population into soldiers and cultivators

Under Dessalines the state concentrated workers on large estates under police supervision. Gerlus sets out the mechanism as a piece of legal sociology. Everyone who was not a soldier had to be bound to the soil as a cultivator on a named plantation, and deserting that plantation was formally forbidden. Soldiers were stationed on the estates to enforce discipline. There was effectively no cash in the arrangement: labourers attached to a plantation took a quarter of the harvest, and every cultivator, whether a large owner or a smallholder, owed the state another quarter as tax. Gerlus notes the immediate popular answer, which was flight, so that runaway cultivators became the standard form of resistance to state-managed agriculture. He also records that Dessalines, the first person who had been a plantation slave to rule the country, was killed in part because of the rigidity of this policy.

Arnaud Andre Roberjot Lartigue, a Creole planter who had fled the colony in 1803 and still expected France to retake the whole island, was appointed agent of the Saint-Domingue government at St Thomas. His actual assignment was narrow: French prize cases and the affairs of French citizens arriving on the Danish island. He went well past it. He put to Governor Muhlenfels the question whether a foreign nation had any right to trade with the revolted of Saint-Domingue and answered it himself, arguing that a revolt of Blacks in part of a colony does not interrupt ownership, that the revolt did not repeal the laws barring foreigners from the colony's ports, and that such trade broke France's treaties. He added a warning of self-interest, that what befalls one government today befalls another tomorrow and every slaveholding power should be prohibiting the traffic.

The article prints a certificate signed by Repussard, commander of the national guard at Verrettes, together with his officers and men. It records the capture of insurgents in the heights above the town and their separate interrogations, in which they said they had risen on the secret orders of Charles Belair and were bound to obey him as their chief. The statements describe a plan to concentrate in the Grands Cahos, to kill blacks and men of colour who had gone over to the French, to obtain cartridges from Saint-Marc on the pretext of marching against the rebels, to kill Repussard and his guardsmen, and then to join the rising. The last statements say the moment had to be seized or the whites would restore slavery and kill everyone who had served under Toussaint. The document was sealed and sent directly to Rochambeau.

Napoleon removed Ferdinand VII from the Spanish throne and installed his own elder brother Joseph. Spanish subjects in Cuba refused the substitution, and the anger fell on the French population of the island, most of whom had arrived as refugees from the war in Saint-Domingue and had spent five or six years building coffee estates in the east. On 12 March 1809 the Marques de Someruelos, captain general of Cuba, issued a proclamation ordering every town and parish to form a vigilance committee, investigate the conduct and opinions of the French among them, and expel anyone whose presence looked dangerous. News of the decrees reached Louisiana in April, printed in the New Orleans papers, probably carried on the same boats as the first people driven out. A boatload of refugees reached Fort Plaquemines below the city by 12 May. The expulsion produced the last and largest movement of Saint-Domingue refugees into the United States.