Christophe leases the north's estates and keeps his nobles on notice

During the years when Haiti was split into a northern kingdom and a southern republic, Gerlus finds Christophe reproducing the feudal structure of the preceding regime rather than departing from it. State estates went out on five-year leases. The large plantations the state retained were worked by cultivators required to live on them and to grow money crops, chiefly sugar and coffee, and the labourer's remuneration was a quarter of the total crop, exactly the proportion set under Dessalines. Each family also had a garden plot for food eaten at home, which Gerlus treats as the crack in the system, since a household that could feed itself had little reason to work cane. The kingdom's nobles received their estates by royal favour and held them as leases only so long as the king was satisfied, which made aristocratic property a form of political dependence rather than a secure interest.

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.

The final French position in the region was the eastern side of the island. Troops under Kerversau and then Ferrand remained in Santo Domingo after the defeat next door and repelled an invasion by Dessalines in 1805. Girard records what happened when Paris tried to reinforce them with survivors of the Saint-Domingue expedition who had regrouped in Cuba. The soldiers were so unwilling to serve in the region again that they deliberately took their ships off course, with some wrecked and others landing in American ports and being sent home to France. The last French troops left Santo Domingo in 1809, closing the period his article covers. A large expedition planned to sack Barbados, besiege Jamaica and strike at Newfoundland was shelved without a fight. French territory in the region has been confined to Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyane ever since.

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.