Petion's senate takes the legislature and chooses the president

The republican constitution of the south, largely written by Petion, concentrated power in a senate rather than an executive. Gaffield cites the article giving the senate exclusive legislative authority in all cases, and the article restricting senators to citizens who had served in a civil or military function with integrity and honour, which she notes leaves honour undefined while confining candidates to the upper classes. A further article limited the presidency to citizens who were or had been senators or secretaries of state, and the senate chose which of them would succeed. On religion the document reversed Dessalines, making the apostolic and Roman Catholic faith the religion of all Haitians and the religion of the state, with its clergy specifically protected, an affiliation she links to the country's rejection by Rome.

The final French position in the region was the eastern side of the island. Troops under Kerversau and then Ferrand remained in Santo Domingo after the defeat next door and repelled an invasion by Dessalines in 1805. Girard records what happened when Paris tried to reinforce them with survivors of the Saint-Domingue expedition who had regrouped in Cuba. The soldiers were so unwilling to serve in the region again that they deliberately took their ships off course, with some wrecked and others landing in American ports and being sent home to France. The last French troops left Santo Domingo in 1809, closing the period his article covers. A large expedition planned to sack Barbados, besiege Jamaica and strike at Newfoundland was shelved without a fight. French territory in the region has been confined to Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyane ever since.

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.

Dessalines's second in command, the mixed race officer Nicolas Geffrard, opened his own channel to the Spanish governor of Santiago de Cuba. The letter is notable for its polished style and its learned references to Roman antiquity, describing Rochambeau as a genius more inventive than Nero, Caligula and Heliogabalus. Its diplomacy was practical. It stressed common ground between the two islands by recalling that mixed race exiles from the revolution had found peaceful refuge in Cuba a few years earlier, and it promised not to carry the slave revolt to Cuban shores, a shrewd concession given how much Spanish policy turned on security fears. Girard reads the use of lighter skinned officers as intermediaries as a deliberate accommodation of the racial prejudices of the men being addressed, and as a continuation of Louverture's diplomatic methods.