The treasury pays a thousand gourdes a day at Les Cayes

Dessalines spent his last stay at Les Cayes from 1 August to 9 September 1806. Madiou records that the expenses of Euphemie Daguilh, settled by the public treasury, had run at a thousand gourdes a day from the moment the emperor arrived in the town. Dessalines refused to credit the figure until the itemised note of the payments, certified by the treasurer, was put in front of him and read out by Diaquoi. He then ordered that she be allowed eight hundred piastres a month and no more. Inginac, writing his memoirs almost forty years later, said the money had been spent in the emperor's name. Much of it went on quieting the resentments that had built up against him through the war in the South. The conspiracy that killed him at Pont-Rouge six weeks later was being organised in the same town while the accounts were being argued over.

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.

Yellow fever reached the French expeditionary army in Saint-Domingue within weeks of its victory. Doctors first took it for plague. The sick complained of violent pain, then fever and thirst and vomiting, the tongue thickened, the gums blackened, the skin turned yellow, and death came within three days or between the seventh and the eleventh. Cold drinks, baths, bleeding, emetics and mild purgatives were tried and did nothing. On 1 August 1802 a squadron from Toulon under Rear Admiral Dumanoir anchored in the roadstead at Cap with three thousand men aboard, and on 7 August three transports arrived with two thousand more. They were given no time to acclimatise and in under twenty days all of them had been swept away. The funeral tables kept by the expedition itself record more than thirty five thousand men dead in this period. Corpses were collected by cart at night and tipped into a common pit.