A census counts seven thousand slaves next door to free Haiti

A census of French Santo Domingo published in 1808 listed 7,052 people under the heading of slaves. Thirty five per cent of them were recorded in Santo Domingo city and Santiago, the colony's two main urban centres, though the count probably favoured the places where officials found it easiest to gather data. Town life gave some of these people room to move. Catholic brotherhoods had long been part of the social fabric of colonial Santo Domingo, offering members of every condition material and spiritual support, and under Ferrand some of those held as slaves used them to improve their situation. A survey of 1806 listed sixty one blacks belonging to the Brotherhood of Saint Antoine at Santiago among the colony's rural properties, and noted that they had lived in a state of independence which had never allowed officials to collect any goods from them. Four days' ride to the west, Haiti had abolished slavery and won a war over it.

Between May 1809 and the middle of the following January, the mayor of New Orleans, James Mather, tallied 9,059 arrivals and sent the number to the governor. Almost all had sailed from Santiago de Cuba or Baracoa, expelled from the island where they had taken shelter after fleeing Saint-Domingue. Only one vessel in the movement came from Havana. Further landings in the first months of 1810 carried the total past 10,000. The three castes of the old colonial order arrived in roughly equal numbers: white, free of colour, and enslaved. Children made up 42 percent of the free people of colour, 29 percent of the enslaved and 24 percent of the whites. Orleans Parish held 17,001 people in 1806 and 24,552 in 1810, and the refugees were 90 percent of the growth in the free coloured population. Measured against the town itself, between 10,000 and 12,000 residents in 1806 and 17,242 in 1810, the arrivals doubled New Orleans.

Dedee Bazile was born near Cap Francais to enslaved parents. Accounts of her differ. One has her raped by her master at about eighteen, then following the indigenous army as a sutler until Rochambeau's men killed three of her brothers and two of her sons at a dance at Doco, after which she lost her reason. Another, printed in the review Le Document in February 1940, makes her a fighter who went mad after seeing two brothers cut down beside her. She was called Defilee from the order she repeated endlessly to indifferent passersby. On 17 October 1806, children were pelting the remains of Jean Jacques Dessalines with stones on the Place du Gouvernement. She came past, asked who it was, and for a moment her eyes cleared. She ran for a sack, came back, gathered the bloodied remains into it and carried them to the town cemetery, where soldiers sent by Petion buried them for a small sum.

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.