A bankrupt Jamaica merchant becomes Haiti's British creditor

Robert Sutherland was listed as a resident of Jamaica declaring bankruptcy in a London court. Pierre traces the arc from there. Within months he was in Haiti accumulating coffee in bulk on a scale that put a hundred thousand pounds of value into a single voyage, and by October 1808 he was speaking for the foreign merchants before the senate of Pétion's republic, offering to lend the government money for its war against Christophe and pushing the Haitian merchants' rival offer aside. His death in 1828 left his beneficiaries three hundred and eight enslaved workers in Jamaica, and when Britain abolished slavery his descendants collected close to eight thousand pounds in compensation for that human property. Pierre reads the trajectory from bankrupt Scot to beneficiary as pivoting entirely on the trade agreements he negotiated with early Haitian leaders.

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 1805, a few months after Dessalines was crowned emperor, free black and mixed race militiamen in Bahia were found wearing medallion portraits of him. Geggus makes the status of these men the point of the story. They were freemen, not enslaved, and he cites Stuart Schwartz to the effect that nothing connects the long cycle of Bahian slave revolts between 1807 and 1835 to either the French or the Haitian revolution, while such external influences are clearly visible among free men, as in the Tailors' conspiracy of 1798. The same holds for the largely African risings in nineteenth century Cuba. Free people of colour had more literacy and more mobility, so foreign news reached them first, which is why Geggus consistently finds Haitian traces in the free coloured layer of these societies rather than in the enslaved population. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus corrects Kenneth Maxwell, who dates to a visitor in Rio de Janeiro in 1792 a remark about the spell of white power being dissolved; the quotation in fact comes from 1806 and referred to the whole of the Americas.

In October 1802 Petion had taken up arms at Haut du Cap and Dessalines was preparing to do the same at Petite-Riviere, after a secret understanding between them. The French had already tried to arrest him at Gonaives, and he had ridden straight at the officer sent to take him and demanded where the slanders about him came from, which was enough to unsettle the men. At Petite-Riviere he pulled down a gallows the French had put up and then went to the presbytery, where the priest Videau had invited him to lunch. Chief of brigade Andrieux was at the table waiting for the moment to have him seized. A woman of colour, Madame Pageot, who worked as Videau's servant, appeared in the doorway opposite Dessalines and made him understand with a movement of her hand that he was about to be bound. He said he saw smoke on the mountain, went out, mounted, and fired the alarm cannon. Three thousand peasants came.