A law bans buying under ten carreaux and bolts the estates shut

Manigat produces the evidence that cuts hardest against the image of Petion as the man who gave land to the people. Seeking to reserve the old great colonial estates for a landed oligarchy of anciens libres and a few rallied new freedmen among the military chiefs, the legislators forbade any new purchaser to acquire less than ten carreaux, with the significant exception of enlargements by proprietors already established, under article two of the law of 20 April 1807. Manigat calls the prohibition a protective bolt on large property. Its third recital declared it necessary to prevent the abuses that too great an extension of freedom to acquire plots would give cultivators, and article one made a cultivator's continued possession conditional. The law of 22 January 1808 on claims against former owners likewise called for destroying the pretensions of those seeking daily to break up state estates. Where this account departs from the standard one: Shows the Petion Senate legislating against small holdings in 1807 and 1808, which cuts against the standard portrait of his government as the founder of Haitian peasant proprietorship.

After the French defeat in 1803 most of the remaining white colonists of Saint-Domingue left, and the largest single movement went a short distance east across the Windward Passage. By 1808 more than twenty five thousand people had settled at Baracoa and Santiago de Cuba, in the eastern province of Oriente. They arrived with skills rather than land. They introduced smaller units of production than Cuban planters had been using and greatly extended the growing of coffee, tobacco, cacao and cotton. The later expansion of Cuban sugar owed a good deal to their technical knowledge. Cuban officials welcomed the wealthier arrivals for the capital and the expertise they brought, while ordinary Cubans suspected them of sympathy with the revolution they had run from. Many of the men had spent years in one or another of the armies that fought over Saint-Domingue. In 1809 the Spanish authorities expelled almost all of them, and most sailed for New Orleans.

In 1806 a thirty five year old enslaved woman named Emilie was burned at the stake in Martinique for planning to poison her mistress. The mistress was Madame de La Pagerie, mother of the Empress Josephine. She had been served a ragout whose texture she thought wrong, suspected crushed glass, ate none of it and took her suspicions straight to Captain General Villaret-Joyeuse. He authorised his special tribunal to arrest and interrogate Emilie, and she was burned the day after her conviction. Nobody was harmed by the dish. The charge as recorded was forming a design to poison and kill her mistress, which under the rules of that tribunal was enough on its own. The case became one of the best known in the French Caribbean, and it shows what a lowered standard of proof meant in practice: an untasted meal, a household suspicion, and a woman dead within days.

By July Dessalines had learned that war between France and Britain had resumed, which sharply improved the odds of a rebel victory, and statements supporting outright independence begin to appear in letters his subordinates sent to Jamaican and Cuban authorities that summer and autumn. In early August the three main factions in the colony, the French army, the white planters and the rebels, all applied to the British governor of Jamaica for assistance, and he promptly refused the French. Two British envoys then met Dessalines at Gonaives and filed a long report praising his diplomatic and political skill while noting his continued difficulties with the rank and file. In September he wrote directly to the British government in London, hoping to bypass the envoys and to negotiate state to state rather than colony to colony.