The state owns two thirds of the plantations and cannot work them

Gerlus cites the figure from Leyburn that by this year more than two thirds of the country's productive plantations belonged to the government, and pairs it with a report to the secretary of agriculture describing extensive state lands in every district plus many private domains whose owners wanted them worked on lease or on shares and needed only labourers. The combination is his central paradox. The military rulers were the largest landholders in the country and had no capital with which to buy labour. Their response was to distribute land to army officers in exchange for political loyalty and to sell small and medium farms to anyone able to pay. Haitian agriculture therefore shifted from capitalised plantations to owner-operated smallholdings, and from export crops to food grown for the household and the local market. Gerlus insists this was not planned by anyone; it was the outcome of the revolution.

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.

Between May 1809 and the middle of the following January, the mayor of New Orleans, James Mather, tallied 9,059 arrivals and sent the number to the governor. Almost all had sailed from Santiago de Cuba or Baracoa, expelled from the island where they had taken shelter after fleeing Saint-Domingue. Only one vessel in the movement came from Havana. Further landings in the first months of 1810 carried the total past 10,000. The three castes of the old colonial order arrived in roughly equal numbers: white, free of colour, and enslaved. Children made up 42 percent of the free people of colour, 29 percent of the enslaved and 24 percent of the whites. Orleans Parish held 17,001 people in 1806 and 24,552 in 1810, and the refugees were 90 percent of the growth in the free coloured population. Measured against the town itself, between 10,000 and 12,000 residents in 1806 and 17,242 in 1810, the arrivals doubled New Orleans.

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.