Haiti's civil war opens on a date and does not close for seven years

Pierre follows Claude Moïse in tracing the split to electoral fraud during the 1806 constitutional process that reduced Christophe to a figurehead. The generals decided the battlefield was the arena in which to settle it, and the war began on 18 December 1806 and did not end until 1813. Her interest is in what the internal war did to foreign trade: with the leadership and territory divided, merchants suddenly had several leaders with whom to negotiate, and engagement between traders and generals increased. In April 1807 Sutherland wrote to a London colleague claiming Pétion had warmly received British traders while Christophe was suspected of favouring Bonaparte. Pierre calls this completely false, noting Christophe's hatred of France after his eldest son Ferdinand died a hostage there, and his reputation as an Anglophile. Where this account departs from the standard one: Pierre argues that Sutherland lied to London about Christophe's supposed sympathy for Bonaparte in order to turn British opinion against the northern government and secure advantage for himself and Pétion.

After the French defeat in 1803 most of the remaining white colonists of Saint-Domingue left, and the largest single movement went a short distance east across the Windward Passage. By 1808 more than twenty five thousand people had settled at Baracoa and Santiago de Cuba, in the eastern province of Oriente. They arrived with skills rather than land. They introduced smaller units of production than Cuban planters had been using and greatly extended the growing of coffee, tobacco, cacao and cotton. The later expansion of Cuban sugar owed a good deal to their technical knowledge. Cuban officials welcomed the wealthier arrivals for the capital and the expertise they brought, while ordinary Cubans suspected them of sympathy with the revolution they had run from. Many of the men had spent years in one or another of the armies that fought over Saint-Domingue. In 1809 the Spanish authorities expelled almost all of them, and most sailed for New Orleans.

In 1806 a thirty five year old enslaved woman named Emilie was burned at the stake in Martinique for planning to poison her mistress. The mistress was Madame de La Pagerie, mother of the Empress Josephine. She had been served a ragout whose texture she thought wrong, suspected crushed glass, ate none of it and took her suspicions straight to Captain General Villaret-Joyeuse. He authorised his special tribunal to arrest and interrogate Emilie, and she was burned the day after her conviction. Nobody was harmed by the dish. The charge as recorded was forming a design to poison and kill her mistress, which under the rules of that tribunal was enough on its own. The case became one of the best known in the French Caribbean, and it shows what a lowered standard of proof meant in practice: an untasted meal, a household suspicion, and a woman dead within days.

By July Dessalines had learned that war between France and Britain had resumed, which sharply improved the odds of a rebel victory, and statements supporting outright independence begin to appear in letters his subordinates sent to Jamaican and Cuban authorities that summer and autumn. In early August the three main factions in the colony, the French army, the white planters and the rebels, all applied to the British governor of Jamaica for assistance, and he promptly refused the French. Two British envoys then met Dessalines at Gonaives and filed a long report praising his diplomatic and political skill while noting his continued difficulties with the rank and file. In September he wrote directly to the British government in London, hoping to bypass the envoys and to negotiate state to state rather than colony to colony.