A snubbed agent invents a Caribbean-wide revolution

Lartigue accused Dessalines of sending emissaries to St Thomas to raise the Danish islands, and later described a plan to descend on Martinique and Guadeloupe, kill the inhabitants, burn the towns, raise the enslaved and free people of colour and form fourteen regiments. Gaffield traces the chain. An Englishman named Yong told him that at Jacmel General Moreau had said Haiti expected news at any moment that the enslaved of the French islands had risen. From that Lartigue concluded Dessalines was organising the risings, and he began describing passing travellers of colour as emissaries and their meeting place as a Haitian club. Gaffield notes the motive: on 25 September Lartigue had written acknowledging Ferrand's complaint that he had so far been of no use. Geggus treats the expedition as a rumour spread by a colonist; Jenson thinks there is too much smoke for no fire. Where this account departs from the standard one: Gaffield argues the conspiracy theory that Dessalines was exporting revolution originated in one agent's need to prove his own usefulness, and she sets Geggus's dismissal against Jenson's partial defence of it.

Under French law a child born outside marriage could not inherit, and a parent was not free to leave property as he wished, being obliged to pass it to legitimate heirs. In the new Haitian state an enormous number of children had no standing under any such rule. On 28 May 1805 Jean-Jacques Dessalines issued a law that removed the distinction. There was to be no preference for children born in wedlock. A child's capacity to inherit turned on recognition by a parent. The measure was designed to settle inheritance disputes before they began. Its effect on marriage ran the other way from what the founders intended. A wedding in Haiti cost a civil licence, a payment to the priest and his assistants, clothes bought for the church, a feast afterwards and several days away from work. Once children could inherit without one, the expense had lost its point, and legal marriage stayed rare for the next two centuries.

Renda records the double game in early United States policy. Washington stayed officially neutral toward Louverture's government while American merchants supplied arms that helped the revolution succeed, and Jefferson, who may have supported that trade, certainly welcomed the defeat of Bonaparte's army. Then in 1806 he approved a prohibition on trade with Haiti, driven by the threat that a thriving nation of former slaves posed to slavery in the American South and by the need to manage relations with France. Trade resumed, but formal recognition was withheld until the South seceded. She notes what the country meant on both sides of the American argument over slavery, proof to some that people of African descent could govern themselves and proof to others that they could not, which is why the same nation was both a nightmare to be quarantined and a destination for free black Americans.

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.