Dessalines is killed at Pont Rouge after trying to share out the land

The work traces the assassination to a land quarrel rather than to tyranny alone. By attempting a more equal distribution of property Dessalines antagonised precisely the officers who had accumulated estates during the war and its aftermath, and he had already lost the army and the common people. He was killed just outside the gates of Port-au-Prince at Pont Rouge, on ground the work notes is now occupied by the international airport. Few mourned him, though the book credits his uncompromising vision with having secured victory and independence. Christophe and Petion succeeded him, could not agree, and partitioned the country after an inconclusive civil war, one building a rigid class order that returned cultivators to conditions close to servitude, the other favouring private initiative, inheritance and small farms. Neither invested seriously in educating the formerly enslaved majority. Where this account departs from the standard one: The book dates the assassination to 17 January 1806, whereas the standard account places it on 17 October 1806.

General Louis Ferrand governed the eastern side of Hispaniola from Santo Domingo city after France lost the western side to the Haitians. On 6 January 1805 he issued an order allowing anyone living near the Haitian border to cross into Haiti and take prisoner any Haitian under fourteen years of age. Whoever seized the captive owned the captive. Girls under twelve and boys under ten could never be sent back, and could be attached to a plantation or sold outright. His commandant Joseph Ruiz and other trusted officers were given the job of issuing certificates that recorded who owned each captive and stated that the capture had happened in territory held by rebels. In a letter to Ruiz, Ferrand set out the other half of the policy. Haitian males over fourteen found in Santo Domingo were to be shot. Haiti had declared its independence one year earlier. Its neighbour across an inland border was now running slaving raids on Haitian children with the forms filled in.

Renda records the double game in early United States policy. Washington stayed officially neutral toward Louverture's government while American merchants supplied arms that helped the revolution succeed, and Jefferson, who may have supported that trade, certainly welcomed the defeat of Bonaparte's army. Then in 1806 he approved a prohibition on trade with Haiti, driven by the threat that a thriving nation of former slaves posed to slavery in the American South and by the need to manage relations with France. Trade resumed, but formal recognition was withheld until the South seceded. She notes what the country meant on both sides of the American argument over slavery, proof to some that people of African descent could govern themselves and proof to others that they could not, which is why the same nation was both a nightmare to be quarantined and a destination for free black Americans.

Yellow fever reached the French expeditionary army in Saint-Domingue within weeks of its victory. Doctors first took it for plague. The sick complained of violent pain, then fever and thirst and vomiting, the tongue thickened, the gums blackened, the skin turned yellow, and death came within three days or between the seventh and the eleventh. Cold drinks, baths, bleeding, emetics and mild purgatives were tried and did nothing. On 1 August 1802 a squadron from Toulon under Rear Admiral Dumanoir anchored in the roadstead at Cap with three thousand men aboard, and on 7 August three transports arrived with two thousand more. They were given no time to acclimatise and in under twenty days all of them had been swept away. The funeral tables kept by the expedition itself record more than thirty five thousand men dead in this period. Corpses were collected by cart at night and tipped into a common pit.