Independence is declared at Gonaïves

On the first of January 1804 at Gonaïves, Dessalines had the declaration read out and the country took back its Taíno name. Ayiti. Not a new name, an older one, which was itself a statement about who the place had belonged to before Europe filed a claim. What was actually achieved is easy to state and hard to absorb. An enslaved population defeated the colonial power, then defeated Spain, then defeated Britain, then defeated the largest expeditionary force Napoleon ever sent overseas, and ended with a sovereign state. No other enslaved population anywhere accomplished any one of those things. The cost was set immediately and it never stopped being charged: diplomatic isolation, an American trade embargo, refusal of recognition by every slaveholding power, and eventually the indemnity. Independence was won in 1804. Sovereignty was billed for over the next hundred and twenty one years.

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.

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.

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.