Christophe turns down a presidency stripped of power

Two months after Dessalines was killed at Pont-Rouge, Christophe was offered the presidency of the republic. Wilson says he refused it on a specific ground: the constitution gave the head of state too little authority over a four-year mandate, and he would not preside over a government that could not govern. He kept his troops mobilised and attacked Port-au-Prince, then held by Petion, was forced to pull back in January 1807, and returned to Cap-Haitien. There a general council of nine members, seven of them generals and two civilians, passed a constitutional act at his request that vested full executive, legislative, administrative and military power in him over the north, the north-west and the Artibonite. Wilson thinks Christophe expected the west and the south to follow a well-run northern state, and that this was a misjudgement that split the country three years after independence.

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.

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.