Haiti barters coffee for an audience with a British cabinet minister

Three weeks after the Jérémie rebuke, Ogé wrote from Aux Cayes in a conciliatory register. The three-page letter set out the place of Downie and other English merchants in the emperor's new trade agenda and gave positive assurance that unfair dealing against Haitian merchants would not be permitted. Pierre's key finding is in the framing: in proposing to treat for the cargo on the account of Castlereagh's government, Dessalines reminded Downie that the Haitian state did not necessarily need the goods it was buying and was seeking political connection instead. Castlereagh, also known as Robert Stewart, had been president of the Board of Control overseeing the British East India Company and moved during 1806 to the War and Colonies Office. Pierre argues that Haitian produce was being spent to purchase proximity to a man who could authorise recognition. Where this account departs from the standard one: Pierre notes that accounts praising Castlereagh as an architect of the classical system of diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna never assess what his earlier offices meant for Haiti, and argues that system was built on deliberate exclusion of the new Black state.

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.

With the white population abandoning the sick and the army's own remedies useless, women of Saint-Domingue nursed the French through the yellow fever epidemic using what they knew themselves. They climbed into the mountains to gather the herbs they thought would check the disease and brewed them as infusions. One of them, known as the widow Cotin, did so much that she was called the benefactress of the human race. Her treatment was three glasses of red wine holding a nutmeg and an egg yolk, both baked under ashes and powdered, which brought on heavy sweating. When patients died anyway the women paid for proper funerals and walked behind the coffins, in a season when bodies were being thrown into the sea. The army lost seven hundred of its own doctors. General Leclerc was obliged to thank these women publicly and to print his admiration in the official gazette of Saint-Domingue. Most of them had been enslaved a year or two earlier.