Petion packs an assembly and Christophe answers with his own

The editors give a procedural cause for the division of the country. Christophe, as the senior officer after the assassination of Dessalines in 1806, charged a constituent assembly of delegates from north and south with drafting a new constitution. Petion skilfully increased the number of delegates loyal to him, and the resulting text was unusually restrictive of executive rights, arbitrarily fixing the senate's seat at Port-au-Prince while omitting to designate one for the executive. Irritated by the limits on his powers, Christophe took up arms against Petion, and the civil war that followed split the country into two republics with Christophe holding the north and Petion the south. A constitution was then promulgated in the north conferring the presidency for life on Christophe, printed officially at Cap-Francais. The editors reproduce the northern text from an official printing made at Cap-Francais, which they take to be the version actually in force in that territory.

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.