The United States embargoes Haiti and fails to isolate its trade

Geggus is blunt about the aftermath. Rome broke off relations once the massacres of 1804 were known, and foreign governments withheld recognition for decades, in sharp contrast to their embrace of the Latin American states that became independent in the 1820s. But Haiti was never commercially isolated, despite a United States trade embargo lasting from 1806 to 1810, and it remained an important coffee producer even though the new state could export barely a quarter of its earlier output with thousands of plantations and several towns burned. Its rulers spent decades trying to hold the plantation system together, and the country became instead a nation of peasant smallholders, unique in the Americas. In 1807 it split along regional and class lines into two warring states and stayed divided until 1820. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus rejects the widespread claim that independent Haiti was commercially isolated, and argues that despite the popularity of the phrase black republic the state Dessalines created was a military autocracy, the Republic of Haiti being founded only in 1806 after his assassination.

Napoleon removed Ferdinand VII from the Spanish throne and installed his own elder brother Joseph. Spanish subjects in Cuba refused the substitution, and the anger fell on the French population of the island, most of whom had arrived as refugees from the war in Saint-Domingue and had spent five or six years building coffee estates in the east. On 12 March 1809 the Marques de Someruelos, captain general of Cuba, issued a proclamation ordering every town and parish to form a vigilance committee, investigate the conduct and opinions of the French among them, and expel anyone whose presence looked dangerous. News of the decrees reached Louisiana in April, printed in the New Orleans papers, probably carried on the same boats as the first people driven out. A boatload of refugees reached Fort Plaquemines below the city by 12 May. The expulsion produced the last and largest movement of Saint-Domingue refugees into the United States.

On 4 December 1804 General Louis Ferrand wrote to the Superior Council of Santiago about a ship he had sent to Charleston, South Carolina. Aboard it were people he called black brigands, meaning Haitians his forces had captured. The vessel had come back to Santo Domingo carrying a quantity of rice obtained in the exchange. Ferrand put his revenue at one thousand to twelve hundred gourdes. South Carolina grew rice with enslaved labour and was one of the richest plantation economies in the antebellum United States, so the trade pushed captives into a market that would absorb them and returned a staple food to a colony that grew very little. Ferrand had served in the American Revolution and knew the country he was dealing with. In those same first two years of Haitian independence the United States was Haiti's most important commercial partner, and in 1806 it criminalised that trade. American ports could buy from Haiti and buy Haitians inside the same decade.

In October 1802 Petion had taken up arms at Haut du Cap and Dessalines was preparing to do the same at Petite-Riviere, after a secret understanding between them. The French had already tried to arrest him at Gonaives, and he had ridden straight at the officer sent to take him and demanded where the slanders about him came from, which was enough to unsettle the men. At Petite-Riviere he pulled down a gallows the French had put up and then went to the presbytery, where the priest Videau had invited him to lunch. Chief of brigade Andrieux was at the table waiting for the moment to have him seized. A woman of colour, Madame Pageot, who worked as Videau's servant, appeared in the doorway opposite Dessalines and made him understand with a movement of her hand that he was about to be bound. He said he saw smoke on the mountain, went out, mounted, and fired the alarm cannon. Three thousand peasants came.