Independence comes last, and its declaration says nothing of rights

The chapter's comparative point turns on sequence. The mainland revolutions more or less began with a declaration of independence, while in Haiti it was the last thing to happen, because independence was never the central goal of most actors. The declaration justified secession as necessary to prevent the restoration of slavery and otherwise made no mention of rights. It vowed eternal hatred of France, contrasted the complexions of Haitians and French and called for vengeance against those French who remained, most of whom were massacred in the following months. Dessalines's constitution forbade landowning by whites and required that all Haitians be designated black. The chapter argues Haitian nationalism was unique among the Atlantic revolutions in being defined by race, since white revolutionaries elsewhere expressed little animosity toward rulers who closely resembled them. Where this account departs from the standard one: The chapter rejects readings of the slave revolution as a pursuit of democratic ideals and republican rights, noting that insurgent rhetoric was overwhelmingly counter-revolutionary and never republican, that insurgents used the word citizen as a smear for their opponents, and that the state founded in 1804 was not a republic.

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.

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.

Louverture reached Brest in July 1802 and was not moved to the fortress of Joux on the Swiss frontier until early August, while his wife and sons were sent to Bayonne. Woodward gives April 1803 for his death in the text and dates it precisely under an accompanying illustration. He names tuberculosis as what killed him and adds that the body was never returned to the country he had fought to liberate. The separation of the family was itself part of the mechanism, since the two sons had been educated in Paris and had earlier been used as leverage on their father. Woodward pairs the death with what was happening in the colony at the same moment, where decrees from Bonaparte's government stripped free men of colour of their rights and restored slavery, driving black and mulatto commanders into a single alliance against the French. Where this account departs from the standard one: Woodward attributes the death to tuberculosis, where most accounts of the Fort de Joux imprisonment describe pneumonia, cold and deliberate neglect.