Dessalines is killed and the country splits into two warring states

The tensions between the two halves of the new ruling class came to a head in the assassination of Dessalines in 1806 and the division of the country into two states that fought each other until 1820. Geggus points to a deeper split beneath that quarrel, between a heterogeneous elite and a rural majority of which nearly half had been born in Africa. The elite kept using coercion to hold people on plantations, but by the 1830s Haiti had become a country of small peasant proprietors, which is the outcome the rural population had wanted from the beginning. He also stresses the authoritarian grain running through the whole revolution. Dessalines took the title of emperor, the former slave Christophe made himself king in 1811, and even the republic founded by anciens libres in 1806 granted very narrow political rights.

Lartigue accused Dessalines of sending emissaries to St Thomas to raise the Danish islands, and later described a plan to descend on Martinique and Guadeloupe, kill the inhabitants, burn the towns, raise the enslaved and free people of colour and form fourteen regiments. Gaffield traces the chain. An Englishman named Yong told him that at Jacmel General Moreau had said Haiti expected news at any moment that the enslaved of the French islands had risen. From that Lartigue concluded Dessalines was organising the risings, and he began describing passing travellers of colour as emissaries and their meeting place as a Haitian club. Gaffield notes the motive: on 25 September Lartigue had written acknowledging Ferrand's complaint that he had so far been of no use. Geggus treats the expedition as a rumour spread by a colonist; Jenson thinks there is too much smoke for no fire. Where this account departs from the standard one: Gaffield argues the conspiracy theory that Dessalines was exporting revolution originated in one agent's need to prove his own usefulness, and she sets Geggus's dismissal against Jenson's partial defence of it.

Between May 1809 and the middle of the following January, the mayor of New Orleans, James Mather, tallied 9,059 arrivals and sent the number to the governor. Almost all had sailed from Santiago de Cuba or Baracoa, expelled from the island where they had taken shelter after fleeing Saint-Domingue. Only one vessel in the movement came from Havana. Further landings in the first months of 1810 carried the total past 10,000. The three castes of the old colonial order arrived in roughly equal numbers: white, free of colour, and enslaved. Children made up 42 percent of the free people of colour, 29 percent of the enslaved and 24 percent of the whites. Orleans Parish held 17,001 people in 1806 and 24,552 in 1810, and the refugees were 90 percent of the growth in the free coloured population. Measured against the town itself, between 10,000 and 12,000 residents in 1806 and 17,242 in 1810, the arrivals doubled New Orleans.

The women who had carried the French army through the yellow fever season were killed by it afterwards. They were hanged, bayoneted, burned alive and thrown to fighting dogs. Some of the officers decided that physical suffering was not enough and added a refinement. Women were invited to balls, and in the middle of the evening the music would break off into a funeral march while the coffins of their husbands, brothers and sons were carried in and displayed to them. To diminish what the nursing had proved, it was then put about that black people enjoyed a natural and absolute immunity to the disease. Leclerc's printed thanks stayed on the record all the same, and Haitian women were still producing that page of the official gazette a century and a half later. The claim of immunity arrived after the fact and covered nobody who had died nursing.