A French general voids the freedom papers signed by black officers

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.

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 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.

Sanite Belair of Verrettes married Charles Belair, an aide de camp of Toussaint Louverture and his nephew, who was made a brigadier general and given command of Arcahaie. In August 1802 the couple raised the Seventh colonial demi-brigade and most of the population of Verrettes and took to the hills of the Cahos, after the disarmings, drownings, hangings and the killing of the wives of several officers of that same demi-brigade. She was captured at Corail-Mirault. Her husband, who was not far away, surrendered so as to share her captivity. Leclerc received Dessalines's letter announcing the arrest on 12 September 1802 and appointed a commission that met six hours after the prisoners reached Cap. On 5 October 1802 that commission, four white officers and Clervaux, considered his rank and her sex and sentenced him to be shot and her to be beheaded. She fought the executioner, refused to kneel, and was shot in the end.