Two states divide Haiti and hand out the land in opposite ways

After the murder of Dessalines in 1806 Haiti split in two. Henry Christophe, born in Grenada, ruled the north with a coercive labour regime built on Toussaint's model. Alexandre Petion ran a republic in the south and west with a reputation for letting things be. The difference showed in what each did with state land. In the north the state leased its estates to dignitaries and generals. In the south it distributed them as private property, though officers and senior officials still took the largest share, and sharecropping settled in as the normal arrangement on holdings carved into two, three or five carreaux. Large estates, military strongmen and a labour code survived in both halves. Petion's lighter touch came from weakness, since he never held his generals the way Christophe held his. In 1810 Rigaud raised the south as a separate state, and it lasted until his successor rejoined Petion in 1812.

The United States had prohibited the import of enslaved people from abroad in 1808. When ships from Cuba began arriving at New Orleans the following spring, Governor William Claiborne ordered the enslaved passengers held on board and the vessels impounded, which also trapped the clothing, furniture and small stocks of goods the families had brought with them. Petitions went to Washington within days. On 28 June 1809 the House of Representatives took up a bill remitting the fines and penalties incurred. Thomas Newton argued for it in the language of hospitality, quoting Dido receiving Aeneas after the fall of Troy, saying that one who has known misfortune knows how to relieve it in others. Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina and John Montgomery of Maryland backed the bill on a colder calculation, that the newcomers would never move on unless they kept the property that was their only means of leaving. It passed without a single vote against.

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.

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.