A French decree in Santo Domingo authorises the capture of Haitians

On 6 January 1805 General Jean Louis Ferrand, commanding the French remnant in Santo Domingo, issued an order sanctioning the seizure and enslavement of Haitians. Haiti had declared independence one year earlier. Jean Jacques Dessalines answered in February with an expedition of twenty thousand men against Santo Domingo city, which failed when a French naval squadron under Admiral Missiessy arrived at the right moment and the British declined to help him. In an address to his citizens on 12 April 1805 Dessalines named Ferrand's decree as a reason for the invasion, accused the Spanish side of assisting French designs, and told Haitians to live or die as free people. He had copies of the January order distributed so that people could read it themselves. Emilio Cordero Michel later argued that the decree was indeed the main cause of the campaign, since it showed that Ferrand intended to retake Haiti and restore slavery there as he had in the east.

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.

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.

Sanite Belair of Verrettes married Charles Belair, an aide de camp of Toussaint Louverture and his nephew, who was made a brigadier general and given command of Arcahaie. In August 1802 the couple raised the Seventh colonial demi-brigade and most of the population of Verrettes and took to the hills of the Cahos, after the disarmings, drownings, hangings and the killing of the wives of several officers of that same demi-brigade. She was captured at Corail-Mirault. Her husband, who was not far away, surrendered so as to share her captivity. Leclerc received Dessalines's letter announcing the arrest on 12 September 1802 and appointed a commission that met six hours after the prisoners reached Cap. On 5 October 1802 that commission, four white officers and Clervaux, considered his rank and her sex and sentenced him to be shot and her to be beheaded. She fought the executioner, refused to kneel, and was shot in the end.