Manigat replaces the ferocious tyrant with an enlightened despot

Manigat opens by naming the historiographical obstacle. Haiti's first national historians, Madiou and Ardouin, agreed with different degrees of vehemence in stigmatising Christophe's regime as ferocious tyranny, painting it for posterity as a reign of arbitrariness and cruelty. Against that he proposes a category from European history: not a Haitian Ivan the Terrible but an enlightened despot, a ruler for whom progress is imposed from above by strong personal power because the mass of the governed is judged insufficiently educated to demand it. Christophe's education policy of 1806 to 1820 is presented in this frame, alongside Petion's agrarian policy of 1807 to 1818, as a school textbook exercise in seeing two contemporaries whole. Manigat insists that moving from legend to history is uncomfortable work and that the historian's job is to track the quarry rather than to please either camp. Where this account departs from the standard one: Rejects the portrait of Christophe as an arbitrary tyrant handed down by Madiou and Ardouin, reclassifying him as an enlightened despot.

In January 1810, with the last ships from Cuba still arriving, Governor William Claiborne set down his view of the population he now governed. He confessed apprehension that disorder might break out in a place so mixed and growing more mixed every day. He put the number of free men of colour in and around New Orleans capable of bearing arms at not less than eight hundred, counting those recently landed from Cuba. He allowed that their conduct so far had been correct. He then added that in a country with so large a black population they should be carefully watched. He had already asked the American consul at Santiago de Cuba to steer the remaining French elsewhere, and in November he made the same request of the American agent in Jamaica, saying that Louisiana already had a greater proportion of that kind of population than suited its interests. A rising of enslaved people broke out upriver the following year.

On 18 August 1807 a woman called Louise dite Letort came into a notary's office in Santo Domingo city carrying a manumission act from the year 1739. The clerk recorded it as extremely damaged. It had freed her and her mother Rose sixty eight years earlier, and it stood between her and a government that was putting people back into slavery. She was not alone in making that calculation. Henriette dite Pommeau deposited papers on 28 June 1805 reconstructing a manumission granted around 1787, after losing her originals when rebels destroyed her home town. Margueritte Bonne went to a notary in Le Cap in December 1801 to certify an act of 1790 whose copy had burned in the great fire there in June 1793, then carried that certificate to Santiago and deposited it in August 1803. Freedom in this colony depended on whether a sheet of paper had survived a fire, a war and a sea crossing.

De Young singles out a letter from Dessalines to Leclerc held in the Rochambeau collection at the University of Florida. In it Dessalines specifies aggressive military actions taken in his department by himself and his lieutenants and mentions a supporting action by one of his officers, Commandant Gabart, assisting Commandant Petion on his own orders. The letter matters because of what surrounds it. Three days later Leclerc ordered the arrest of Dessalines and wrote to the first consul that Maurepas and Dessalines were deeply involved in the disasters overtaking the French forces. De Young's reading is that French intelligence had begun to see the general not as an officer executing the most hateful commands of his commander but as a patriot building the military basis of the coming war of independence while appearing to serve.