France demands a US embargo on Haiti and a senator objects

Pierre dates the crucial turn to 1806. By February France was demanding that the United States place an official embargo on Haiti. Samuel White, a senator from Delaware, argued in Congress against banning the trade, complaining that the surrender of this commerce had not been asked as a temporary accommodation but demanded in insulting and peremptory style, and that interdicting it would abandon the American right to it and establish a precedent against the United States itself. Pierre reads White's defence of American sovereignty as betraying how weak that sovereignty was against France. She sets this inside a wider sequence: British trade with the Black government remained illegal until 1825, and at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 Haiti's once-earnest trading partners set aside their commitments in favour of repairing European relations.

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.

In 1805, a few months after Dessalines was crowned emperor, free black and mixed race militiamen in Bahia were found wearing medallion portraits of him. Geggus makes the status of these men the point of the story. They were freemen, not enslaved, and he cites Stuart Schwartz to the effect that nothing connects the long cycle of Bahian slave revolts between 1807 and 1835 to either the French or the Haitian revolution, while such external influences are clearly visible among free men, as in the Tailors' conspiracy of 1798. The same holds for the largely African risings in nineteenth century Cuba. Free people of colour had more literacy and more mobility, so foreign news reached them first, which is why Geggus consistently finds Haitian traces in the free coloured layer of these societies rather than in the enslaved population. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus corrects Kenneth Maxwell, who dates to a visitor in Rio de Janeiro in 1792 a remark about the spell of white power being dissolved; the quotation in fact comes from 1806 and referred to the whole of the Americas.

In October 1802 Petion had taken up arms at Haut du Cap and Dessalines was preparing to do the same at Petite-Riviere, after a secret understanding between them. The French had already tried to arrest him at Gonaives, and he had ridden straight at the officer sent to take him and demanded where the slanders about him came from, which was enough to unsettle the men. At Petite-Riviere he pulled down a gallows the French had put up and then went to the presbytery, where the priest Videau had invited him to lunch. Chief of brigade Andrieux was at the table waiting for the moment to have him seized. A woman of colour, Madame Pageot, who worked as Videau's servant, appeared in the doorway opposite Dessalines and made him understand with a movement of her hand that he was about to be bound. He said he saw smoke on the mountain, went out, mounted, and fired the alarm cannon. Three thousand peasants came.