The state stops paying for religion and Vodou gets room to grow

Gaffield gives three provisions of the 1805 constitution on worship: the law admits no predominant religion, freedom of worship is tolerated, and the state provides for the upkeep of no religious institution and no minister. She treats the apparent indifference as consequential in two directions. It allowed the country's popular religion to develop, and it denied Catholicism the structural support of an official church, which mattered because in Catholic Europe and its colonies religious orders had been the backbone of formal education, and a population newly out of slavery needed exactly that help. An official state religion, on this reading, would also have made international acceptance easier. She sets this against scholarship stressing what state religion costs, and notes that the article on religious liberty was reversed in the very next constitution.

Lartigue reported to Ferrand that four vessels had just sailed from St Thomas for the Cap, Les Cayes and Jacmel, and that the traffic continued without fear of or regard for the general's proclamation, issued three months earlier, condemning to death merchants who traded with Haiti. He noted that he had done his part, that the order had been printed and displayed in the town and was well known to merchants and sailors, and that those with dealings among the revolted were not intimidated. Ships left daily with supplies of every kind. Gaffield uses this as the empirical core of her case against the isolation thesis. She adds a legal complication: in three Admiralty court decisions between 1804 and 1806 the British had ruled that arms and ammunition were contraband but that neutral trade in provisions with a belligerent was lawful, so Lartigue's definition of illegality was not shared by the courts that mattered. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against the long-standing view that the Atlantic powers collectively quarantined Haiti after 1804, Gaffield shows trade running openly and often lawfully throughout the period of diplomatic non-recognition.

Napoleon removed Ferdinand VII from the Spanish throne and installed his own elder brother Joseph. Spanish subjects in Cuba refused the substitution, and the anger fell on the French population of the island, most of whom had arrived as refugees from the war in Saint-Domingue and had spent five or six years building coffee estates in the east. On 12 March 1809 the Marques de Someruelos, captain general of Cuba, issued a proclamation ordering every town and parish to form a vigilance committee, investigate the conduct and opinions of the French among them, and expel anyone whose presence looked dangerous. News of the decrees reached Louisiana in April, printed in the New Orleans papers, probably carried on the same boats as the first people driven out. A boatload of refugees reached Fort Plaquemines below the city by 12 May. The expulsion produced the last and largest movement of Saint-Domingue refugees into the United States.

The article prints a certificate signed by Repussard, commander of the national guard at Verrettes, together with his officers and men. It records the capture of insurgents in the heights above the town and their separate interrogations, in which they said they had risen on the secret orders of Charles Belair and were bound to obey him as their chief. The statements describe a plan to concentrate in the Grands Cahos, to kill blacks and men of colour who had gone over to the French, to obtain cartridges from Saint-Marc on the pretext of marching against the rebels, to kill Repussard and his guardsmen, and then to join the rising. The last statements say the moment had to be seized or the whites would restore slavery and kill everyone who had served under Toussaint. The document was sealed and sent directly to Rochambeau.