Haitian independence enters American print via a Philadelphia paper

The proclamation appeared first in Poulson's Daily Advertiser and in the Aurora General Advertiser, then in the Philadelphia Gazette the following evening. The article reconstructs the diffusion from digitised newspaper archives and prints the chain: New York and Philadelphia on 6 and 7 January, Trenton and Newark on the ninth, Washington on the twelfth, then Newburyport, Wilmington, Providence, Richmond, Salem, Boston, Charleston, Portland, Hudson, Northampton, Sparta in Georgia, Peacham in Vermont and Nashville by 22 February. Editors read it as a declaration of independence and said so. The mechanism this exposes is a deliberate media strategy rather than passive circulation, since Dessalines's government repeatedly asked American editors to print its texts and once instructed that a decree be printed, posted and forwarded directly to the Congress of the United States.

After independence, successive Haitian governments commissioned privateers of their own and turned them against the traffic in people. Some of these vessels carried names that announced the purpose. One was the Wilberforce, after the British campaigner against the slave trade. One was the Abolition de la Traite, meaning abolition of the trade. A third was the Philanthrope. They went after slaving ships making for Jamaica and Cuba. Captives taken out of those ships were brought to Haiti, where the constitution granted citizenship to anyone of African descent who arrived. They were then set to work under the labour system the Haitian state had inherited from the colony, which tied cultivators to estates and required them to stay. The men who commissioned these ships were answering the French commander in Santo Domingo, who was seizing young Haitians for sale abroad. Haiti was at once a refuge from the Atlantic trade and a state that still wanted field hands.

General Louis Ferrand governed the eastern side of Hispaniola from Santo Domingo city after France lost the western side to the Haitians. On 6 January 1805 he issued an order allowing anyone living near the Haitian border to cross into Haiti and take prisoner any Haitian under fourteen years of age. Whoever seized the captive owned the captive. Girls under twelve and boys under ten could never be sent back, and could be attached to a plantation or sold outright. His commandant Joseph Ruiz and other trusted officers were given the job of issuing certificates that recorded who owned each captive and stated that the capture had happened in territory held by rebels. In a letter to Ruiz, Ferrand set out the other half of the policy. Haitian males over fourteen found in Santo Domingo were to be shot. Haiti had declared its independence one year earlier. Its neighbour across an inland border was now running slaving raids on Haitian children with the forms filled in.

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.