A constitution designed to bind the executive elects Christophe to it

After Dessalines fell to a military conspiracy on 17 October 1806, the imperial regime was abolished and a Constituent Assembly met at Port-au-Prince in December, composed largely of Petion's friends. It voted a constitution drawing on the Declaration of the Rights of Man, with a president elected for four years, a Senate of eighty members and judges appointed for life. Bellegarde identifies the mechanism of the split that followed: by excessive reaction against dictatorship, the assembly gave the legislature decisive advantages over the president. On 28 December 1806 Henri Christophe, general-in-chief of the army, was elected president under that constitution. Finding the powers too restricted, he withdrew into the North and had a different constitution voted on 17 February 1807 naming him president for life and generalissimo with the right to choose his successor. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

After the French defeat in 1803 most of the remaining white colonists of Saint-Domingue left, and the largest single movement went a short distance east across the Windward Passage. By 1808 more than twenty five thousand people had settled at Baracoa and Santiago de Cuba, in the eastern province of Oriente. They arrived with skills rather than land. They introduced smaller units of production than Cuban planters had been using and greatly extended the growing of coffee, tobacco, cacao and cotton. The later expansion of Cuban sugar owed a good deal to their technical knowledge. Cuban officials welcomed the wealthier arrivals for the capital and the expertise they brought, while ordinary Cubans suspected them of sympathy with the revolution they had run from. Many of the men had spent years in one or another of the armies that fought over Saint-Domingue. In 1809 the Spanish authorities expelled almost all of them, and most sailed for New Orleans.

In 1806 a thirty five year old enslaved woman named Emilie was burned at the stake in Martinique for planning to poison her mistress. The mistress was Madame de La Pagerie, mother of the Empress Josephine. She had been served a ragout whose texture she thought wrong, suspected crushed glass, ate none of it and took her suspicions straight to Captain General Villaret-Joyeuse. He authorised his special tribunal to arrest and interrogate Emilie, and she was burned the day after her conviction. Nobody was harmed by the dish. The charge as recorded was forming a design to poison and kill her mistress, which under the rules of that tribunal was enough on its own. The case became one of the best known in the French Caribbean, and it shows what a lowered standard of proof meant in practice: an untasted meal, a household suspicion, and a woman dead within days.

When Bonaparte received news of the 1801 constitution he sent a large military mission under his brother-in-law to restore metropolitan control and to co-opt, expel or eliminate Louverture and the generals under his command. After three months of fighting, known as the three months war, Louverture surrendered, was trapped and deported to France, and died in prison at Fort de Joux. The editors state the causal chain without hedging: promulgating the constitution provoked the events that finally led to the creation of the Haitian state and to the drafting of its first national constitution. Resistance to the French army continued after the deportation, and under Dessalines the country won an independence formally declared on the first of January 1804. The editors also record what the constitution had formalised in the meantime, describing it as extending a structure of governance already essentially in place under his rule.