A French general trades kidnapped Haitian children for Carolina rice

Pierre records that on the Christian holiday of Epiphany a rogue French general in Santo Domingo issued a proclamation demanding the kidnapping of Haitian children, who were then sold for Carolina rice. She uses the episode to explain something otherwise puzzling in Dessalines's commercial policy. When the emperor later offered English merchants licences carrying distinction and extensive government protection over foreign employees and foreign merchandise, the licensing was in part a security measure: a foreign trader who held a Haitian licence could be identified and watched. Pierre's argument is that Haitian foreign economic policy in these years cannot be separated from domestic safety, because the young state was still being raided by an enemy holding the eastern half of the island. The preconditions Dessalines attached to trade, she notes, foreshadow requirements that later became canonical in neoliberal arrangements.

In October 1803 Captain General Louis Thomas Villaret-Joyeuse set up a special tribunal in Martinique to try three offences together: poisoning, arson, and running away by stealing canoes. It sat between the first and second British occupations of the island, in the middle of the Napoleonic wars, and it built on the precedent of 1753, when the colony had first given poison cases their own rules. The tribunal travelled, its members were government officials and prominent local slaveholders, and the executions, usually burning at the stake, took place on the spot as soon as a trial ended. There was no appeal. Within two years Villaret-Joyeuse was reporting that the blight of poisonings was in retreat thanks to the court. The trials ran on until the British landed in February 1809, and the incoming British governor kept both the tribunal and the leading part local slaveholders played in it.

Yellow fever reached the French expeditionary army in Saint-Domingue within weeks of its victory. Doctors first took it for plague. The sick complained of violent pain, then fever and thirst and vomiting, the tongue thickened, the gums blackened, the skin turned yellow, and death came within three days or between the seventh and the eleventh. Cold drinks, baths, bleeding, emetics and mild purgatives were tried and did nothing. On 1 August 1802 a squadron from Toulon under Rear Admiral Dumanoir anchored in the roadstead at Cap with three thousand men aboard, and on 7 August three transports arrived with two thousand more. They were given no time to acclimatise and in under twenty days all of them had been swept away. The funeral tables kept by the expedition itself record more than thirty five thousand men dead in this period. Corpses were collected by cart at night and tipped into a common pit.

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.