Girard calls the killing of the French planters a completed genocide

Independence was declared at Gonaives on 1 January 1804, and over the next four months, under Dessalines' personal supervision, French planters, soldiers and merchants were rounded up and killed across the country, men first, then women and children. A few were hidden by foreign merchants, by moderate officers and by Dessalines' own wife, and Poles, Americans, priests and doctors were spared. In April Dessalines announced in a further address that the work was complete. Girard's verdict is severe. The Spanish destroyed the Taino without intending to and the French in 1803 considered killing all black people but failed, whereas Dessalines combined intent with execution. He argues the act also destroyed the colony's trained cadres, since planters, engineers, administrators, officers and even Louverture's secretaries had been white, leaving the population illiterate and unskilled for decades. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard classes the 1804 killings as a genocide worse than the Spanish and French colonial crimes and blames it for Haiti's diplomatic isolation and loss of skilled personnel.

Commodore Cumberland stationed the frigate Pique off the harbour, put brigs in the channel to Isle a Vache and told his indigenous allies to bring up small craft. Hunger did the rest. The garrison ate diseased mules, the dead were carted into the sea nightly, and men foraging at the O'Shiell farm died eating poisonous plants. Brunet's council of war rejected evacuation to Cartagena as suicide and negotiated. Cumberland conceded military honours but insisted the whole garrison become prisoners of war, seized every vessel in port as spoil, and blocked the civilian exodus he had promised to assist. Twenty-five Polish officers and 231 other ranks went into captivity, their pay certified by Malachowski's administrative bureau on the way out. The British handed the town to the insurgents within a day or two, and Dessalines, learning of its fall, turned north toward Le Cap. Where this account departs from the standard one: The work weighs the Polish memoirists against Madiou and concludes that Lux and Wierzbicki embellished the massacre they reported at Les Cayes, since Madiou records that persons and property were respected when the southern army entered.

In 1803 the American wax artists Davenport and Bishop toured a collection of figures that included the black general Toussaint, described as the late governor of the colony and modelled from an existing painting. Wax was the most lifelike medium of the age, imitating flesh better than any other material, and figures were built at full size with real hair and appropriate clothing. Shows ran in taverns, hotels and rented rooms at low prices, drew large crowds, and this itinerary crossed the line between free and slave states, taking in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Rhode Island. White stresses what the billing does. Louverture is called only by his first name and placed down the list between a local beauty and a moral scene rather than among the white revolutionary luminaries, yet he is presented as a commander, which cut directly against French policy at that moment.

Johnson catalogues factual errors in published textbooks and corrects them directly. One survey claimed that Bonaparte attempted to reinstitute slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1800, and she points out that the expedition he sent did not land until 1802 and lost to the revolutionaries in 1803. Alongside this she corrects a claim that the colony held nearly one million enslaved people, saying the number was closer to five hundred thousand at the start of the revolution. She also objects to describing Boukman Dutty as a poet delivering a call to revolution in a Haitian French patois, arguing he should be identified as a Vodou priest who most likely spoke Haitian Creole, and to using the word mulatto for the whole category of free people of colour, which she says misrepresents current scholarship. Where this account departs from the standard one: Johnson explicitly corrects published world history textbooks that date Bonaparte's move against emancipation to 1800 and that inflate the enslaved population to a million.