Dessalines tells an English merchant to take thirty percent or leave

A letter dated from the palace at Jérémie carried the emperor's outrage that a vendor expected a fifty percent margin when thirty was on offer. Dessalines accused John Downie of being difficult to deal with, told him he was free to sell his cargo wherever and to whomever he pleased, and expected the offered percentage to be settled in produce previously negotiated by his secretary Joseph Ogé. Pierre sets the exchange against a frustrated American sailor writing from Haiti in December 1804, who had sold at twenty-five percent on invoice cost into a market saturated with American vessels where only four or five licensed buyers operated in each port. The mechanism she is describing is the consignment system inherited from colonial Saint-Domingue, in which foreign captains had to hand cargo to licensed Haitian wholesalers, a structure full of openings for graft.

On 4 December 1804 General Louis Ferrand wrote to the Superior Council of Santiago about a ship he had sent to Charleston, South Carolina. Aboard it were people he called black brigands, meaning Haitians his forces had captured. The vessel had come back to Santo Domingo carrying a quantity of rice obtained in the exchange. Ferrand put his revenue at one thousand to twelve hundred gourdes. South Carolina grew rice with enslaved labour and was one of the richest plantation economies in the antebellum United States, so the trade pushed captives into a market that would absorb them and returned a staple food to a colony that grew very little. Ferrand had served in the American Revolution and knew the country he was dealing with. In those same first two years of Haitian independence the United States was Haiti's most important commercial partner, and in 1806 it criminalised that trade. American ports could buy from Haiti and buy Haitians inside the same decade.

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.

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.