The state created in 1804 was never a republic

In a list of corrections to the book's Haitian chapter the reviewer states flatly that the state created in 1804 was not a republic, and adds that historians persist in describing it that way. The correction sits alongside others of the same order: that the wealth of Saint-Domingue and of its free coloured inhabitants is exaggerated in the book, and that calling the conseils superieurs governing bodies misleads, since they resembled Audiencias more closely than British colonial assemblies and therefore give a confusing picture of colonial politics. The reviewer signals that these inaccuracies are mostly minor, but the republic point recurs across his work and is presented as a substantive rather than a cosmetic error, because the label imports assumptions about representative institutions into a polity whose head took the titles governor general and then emperor. Where this account departs from the standard one: Contradicts the standard description of the state founded in 1804 as a republic.

Arnaud Andre Roberjot Lartigue, a Creole planter who had fled the colony in 1803 and still expected France to retake the whole island, was appointed agent of the Saint-Domingue government at St Thomas. His actual assignment was narrow: French prize cases and the affairs of French citizens arriving on the Danish island. He went well past it. He put to Governor Muhlenfels the question whether a foreign nation had any right to trade with the revolted of Saint-Domingue and answered it himself, arguing that a revolt of Blacks in part of a colony does not interrupt ownership, that the revolt did not repeal the laws barring foreigners from the colony's ports, and that such trade broke France's treaties. He added a warning of self-interest, that what befalls one government today befalls another tomorrow and every slaveholding power should be prohibiting the traffic.

With the French expedition days from landing and still convinced that Jefferson wholeheartedly supported its mission, Secretary of State Madison instructed the American commercial agent at Cap to adopt a policy of strict neutrality. Girard spells out what the phrase meant in practice. The agent was to make no effort to combat American contraband reaching the rebels. The misunderstanding, he writes, created much acrimony after the French landing, and it fits his larger argument that the expedition's supply arrangements were built on assurances that quietly dissolved. Jefferson's second thoughts had come too late to matter for the sailing, since the largest squadron in the French navy was already preparing to leave Brest and Bonaparte would never have accepted the independence of the most valuable French colony under Anglo-American tutelage. Girard reads the episode as the first sign that the supply arrangements underpinning the whole expedition rested on promises no one intended to police.

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.