Both factions rig the Constituent Assembly and the country splits

As provisional head of government after the dissolution of the empire, Christophe called the assembly counting on the larger number of northern and Artibonite parishes to give him a majority. Petion had himself elected along with deputies from villages that had never been represented, which reversed the majority. When the assembly met in Port-au-Prince the two camps were beyond reconciliation. It elected Christophe president for four years while vesting executive, legislative and judicial power in the Senate. He marched on the capital, failed to defeat Petion, returned to Cap Haitien and won a vote naming him president for life with the right to name his successor, creating the State of Haiti. The Senate then elected Petion president of the Republic of Haiti. A civil war followed that lasted twelve years, and the country was reunited only under Boyer after Petion died in 1818 and Christophe in 1820.

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.

The earliest known written use of the word Candomble comes from a police raid in 1807 near Santo Amaro in Bahia. The charge had nothing to do with healing or with causing harm. The accusation was that the house sheltered runaways and held gunpowder and arms. That is the shape repression took in these decades. Police looked at houses of worship and saw gatherings of people of African descent that might become a rising, and after the revolts of the early nineteenth century they treated any African associated object as a threat in itself. In another raid in 1830 they charged a Candomble leader with being partly responsible for four hundred runaways in his district. Poison accusations had meanwhile nearly vanished from the record. Of eighty two usable police investigations from Cachoeira between 1820 and 1839, four concerned poison, and three of those were enslaved people who killed themselves with arsenic.

By July Dessalines had learned that war between France and Britain had resumed, which sharply improved the odds of a rebel victory, and statements supporting outright independence begin to appear in letters his subordinates sent to Jamaican and Cuban authorities that summer and autumn. In early August the three main factions in the colony, the French army, the white planters and the rebels, all applied to the British governor of Jamaica for assistance, and he promptly refused the French. Two British envoys then met Dessalines at Gonaives and filed a long report praising his diplomatic and political skill while noting his continued difficulties with the rank and file. In September he wrote directly to the British government in London, hoping to bypass the envoys and to negotiate state to state rather than colony to colony.