Petion is elected president in the south and the split hardens

Wilson dates the formal division of Haiti to Petion's election as president of the new republic of the south, the office Christophe had refused and then tried to take by force. Petion succeeded Dessalines, who had been murdered at Pont-Rouge on 17 October 1806. The republic covered the west and the whole southern peninsula from Port-au-Prince to Cape Tiburon, while Christophe's constitutional act had claimed only the north, the north-west and the centre. Wilson notes that the secession of the north did not prevent Petion's re-election at the end of his first term four years later on the same date, which is the fact that finally moved Christophe. Having failed to draw the other departments to him by example and having watched his rival's legitimacy be renewed, he changed the basis of his own authority within weeks.

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.

When Bonaparte received news of the 1801 constitution he sent a large military mission under his brother-in-law to restore metropolitan control and to co-opt, expel or eliminate Louverture and the generals under his command. After three months of fighting, known as the three months war, Louverture surrendered, was trapped and deported to France, and died in prison at Fort de Joux. The editors state the causal chain without hedging: promulgating the constitution provoked the events that finally led to the creation of the Haitian state and to the drafting of its first national constitution. Resistance to the French army continued after the deportation, and under Dessalines the country won an independence formally declared on the first of January 1804. The editors also record what the constitution had formalised in the meantime, describing it as extending a structure of governance already essentially in place under his rule.