Christophe builds a monarchy to out-abolish imperial France

Destin argues that Christophe modelled the north on a monarchy for a reason that has nothing to do with vanity. Britain was doing more to abolish slavery than imperial France, which had earlier offered emancipation as a bargaining chip, or than the United States and Spain, which lagged as slaveholding powers. If a kingdom could do more against slavery than a republic, Haitians might be better placed inside one. The move both honoured black independence and provoked slaveholding powers, and Christophe sent letters asking foreign leaders to address him by his title, which caused outrage. He contracted German builders for the mountain fortress, corresponded with British abolitionists about public instruction, and recruited teachers. Destin says the fortress and the palace, rather than the crown, are what now stand for Haitian nationality.

On 7 November 1808 General Jean Louis Ferrand marched about six hundred men toward Seybo, in eastern Santo Domingo, to put down a rising led by an officer he had once trusted with the district. He believed the sight of him would restore order and that any resistance would break easily. Waiting for him were 2,100 soldiers sent from Havana and Puerto Rico. The battle was one sided. Ferrand ordered the survivors to withdraw, said aloud that he was the victim of his own overconfidence, took a cartridge from an aide before anyone could stop him, primed his pistols and killed himself. He had soldiered for twenty five years, through the American and French revolutions, and had run the last French government in Hispaniola for almost five. His second in command, General Joseph Barquier, took over a position that was already lost. Six weeks later a junta named Juan Sanchez Ramirez governor in the name of Ferdinand VII.

Napoleon Bonaparte had removed Ferdinand VII from the Spanish throne and put his own brother Joseph in his place. Spanish subjects in Cuba refused to accept the substitution, and their anger fell on the French planters and craftsmen who had settled among them after fleeing Saint-Domingue. On 12 March 1809 the Marques de Someruelos, captain general of Cuba, issued a proclamation ordering a vigilance committee in every town and every parish to look into the conduct and the opinions of the French living there and to expel anyone whose presence seemed dangerous. The committees worked fast. News of the expulsion orders reached Louisiana in April, probably carried on the same vessels as the first people driven out. Many of those expelled had already rebuilt their lives once after leaving Saint-Domingue, and among them they had established five hundred estates in eastern Cuba. They now lost a second set of properties and went looking for a third country.

With the white population abandoning the sick and the army's own remedies useless, women of Saint-Domingue nursed the French through the yellow fever epidemic using what they knew themselves. They climbed into the mountains to gather the herbs they thought would check the disease and brewed them as infusions. One of them, known as the widow Cotin, did so much that she was called the benefactress of the human race. Her treatment was three glasses of red wine holding a nutmeg and an egg yolk, both baked under ashes and powdered, which brought on heavy sweating. When patients died anyway the women paid for proper funerals and walked behind the coffins, in a season when bodies were being thrown into the sea. The army lost seven hundred of its own doctors. General Leclerc was obliged to thank these women publicly and to print his admiration in the official gazette of Saint-Domingue. Most of them had been enslaved a year or two earlier.