A drum from the war of independence stands one metre thirty eight high

An asoto drum, about 1.38 metres tall, carries the date 1806 and is said to have been used in the war of independence. The drum is not an accessory in this religion. It is treated as a divinity whose energy has to be renewed by particular rites, it is baptised in a ceremony of its own, and it receives offerings of food and libations. Its function in worship is to call the spirits of Guinea and the ancestors down into the peristyle. That is why the phrase about beating the drum came to stand for the whole practice, and why the instrument was the first thing attacked whenever the church or the government moved against what they called paganism. Drums were burned and their use forbidden, campaign after campaign. A wooden object nearly a metre and a half high that survived from 1806 through all of that is a piece of evidence about persistence.

The final French position in the region was the eastern side of the island. Troops under Kerversau and then Ferrand remained in Santo Domingo after the defeat next door and repelled an invasion by Dessalines in 1805. Girard records what happened when Paris tried to reinforce them with survivors of the Saint-Domingue expedition who had regrouped in Cuba. The soldiers were so unwilling to serve in the region again that they deliberately took their ships off course, with some wrecked and others landing in American ports and being sent home to France. The last French troops left Santo Domingo in 1809, closing the period his article covers. A large expedition planned to sack Barbados, besiege Jamaica and strike at Newfoundland was shelved without a fight. French territory in the region has been confined to Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyane ever since.

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.

Girard accepts that Dessalines did not personally capture the Belairs and then shows what he did afterwards. He wrote to Leclerc stating that he had undeniable evidence that Charles Belair had led the latest insurrection and asking that Charles and his wife be punished. Both were sentenced to death and executed. The article treats this as one instance of a habit rather than an aberration. Denouncing rivals as traitors so that the French would execute or deport them was so common in his correspondence of that year that it amounts to a pattern, and such denunciations were frequent in the intensely competitive politics of the revolution. Personal animus was probably also involved, since Belair had served under his direct command in the spring campaign and had used his relationship with Louverture to appeal against and ignore his orders. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: This directly contradicts the reading in de Young's 1960 article, also in this batch, which argues that Dessalines was faced with a fait accompli and did not seek Belair's death.