The bill for independence: 560,000 dead or gone, exports destroyed

Geggus totals the price at the moment independence was declared. The former French colony had lost more than a third of its total population, some five hundred and sixty thousand people, and at least three quarters of its export capacity. In trying to put the revolution down, France, Spain and Britain together lost close to seventy thousand European soldiers and many thousands of sailors. In relative and sometimes absolute terms, the losses in lives, exile and destroyed property exceeded those of any contemporary revolution. He then adds the qualification that complicates the standard picture of decline. The richest colony in the Americas became the poorest nation, yet the standard of living of most of the people living there had almost certainly improved, as the rapid growth of the formerly enslaved population indicates. Foreign intervention here was hostile rather than helpful, unlike in the North and Spanish American revolutions. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus argues that living standards for most inhabitants rose even as the country became the hemisphere's poorest, against the usual narrative of unrelieved ruin.

Governor Nugent sent Corbet, who had negotiated with black leaders for a decade, to Haiti aboard the Tartare in early January. His report to Kingston states that he is laying before the governor a declaration of independence he says was composed while he was there, or shortly before his arrival at Port-au-Prince, and which he could not present earlier. The article treats this as decisive against the received chronology. It does not settle which part of the Acte Corbet carried, but it contradicts the claim that the full text was drafted overnight on New Year's Eve and published throughout Haiti on 1 January, while confirming that something was in print by the second half of January. The article connects a Charleston news item of 23 February about a proclamation received at Kingston to the same report. Where this account departs from the standard one: Directly contradicts Madiou's account of a single night of composition by Boisrond-Tonnerre followed by nationwide proclamation on 1 January 1804.

Girard accepts that Dessalines did not personally capture the Belairs and then shows what he did afterwards. He wrote to Leclerc stating that he had undeniable evidence that Charles Belair had led the latest insurrection and asking that Charles and his wife be punished. Both were sentenced to death and executed. The article treats this as one instance of a habit rather than an aberration. Denouncing rivals as traitors so that the French would execute or deport them was so common in his correspondence of that year that it amounts to a pattern, and such denunciations were frequent in the intensely competitive politics of the revolution. Personal animus was probably also involved, since Belair had served under his direct command in the spring campaign and had used his relationship with Louverture to appeal against and ignore his orders. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: This directly contradicts the reading in de Young's 1960 article, also in this batch, which argues that Dessalines was faced with a fait accompli and did not seek Belair's death.

From this year ministers in Philadelphia began preaching sermons on the first of January, a date that marked both the abolition of the American slave trade and the declaration of Haitian independence four years earlier. Jackson sets the practice against the mass arrival of refugees from Saint-Domingue in American ports through the seventeen nineties, which brought firsthand accounts of the rebel victory at Cap-Francais into black communities, and against Gary Nash's finding that American born black Philadelphians came to think of themselves differently because of the revolution, as part of an Atlantic African people contesting white supremacy. He notes the contrast in the same city, where white Philadelphians had gathered near Independence Hall on 4 July 1804 to celebrate a very different anniversary, and where the conservative reading of Haiti also had its adherents.