The last French government in Hispaniola signs its surrender

Three men signed the capitulation of the French in Santo Domingo on 6 July 1809. Hugh Lyle Carmichael was a British major general, Juan Sanchez Ramirez the Spanish commander, Joseph Barquier the last French one. Every French soldier was to quit the capital and the other significant posts and take ship for France inside twelve days, with British units holding those posts until the departure was finished, and an exchange of prisoners beginning immediately. Anyone of any sex, condition or colour, French or Spanish, could leave for another Caribbean territory or for the United States at British expense within ten days. A further clause said that all individual and personal property of every description would be respected, wording that could be read as a guarantee for slaveholders. Eleven British warships had entered the harbour on 11 May and troops had landed on 28 June. Santo Domingo passed back to Spain, and the reenslavement project that Ferrand had run for five years ended.

Napoleon put his brother on the Spanish throne, and Spanish Cuba turned on the French who had settled there after fleeing Saint-Domingue. A proclamation of 12 March 1809 expelled every one of them who had no Spanish spouse and had not asked for naturalisation. The first boat reached Louisiana on 12 May. By January 1810 at least 9,059 recorded people had arrived there from Cuba, most of them out of Santiago and Baracoa, with only one ship sailing from Havana. The mayor of New Orleans counted 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of colour and 3,226 slaves, so the wave divided almost evenly into thirds. New Orleans parish had held 17,001 people before they landed. The arrivals raised its white population by forty three per cent, its slave population by thirty eight per cent, and its free population of colour by one hundred and thirty four per cent. Later arrivals brought the total to roughly ten thousand inside nine months.

In 1809 Alexandre Petion, ruling the southern republic after Haiti split in two, decided to break up the large estates and distribute land to his officers and soldiers. It was the first land reform in the history of Latin America. Henry Christophe in the north followed in 1819. Petion had little choice. The French market was gone, the Napoleonic wars made trade with Britain and the United States difficult, and keeping export production going with troops standing over the workers had become too expensive. Inheritance rules taken from the Napoleonic Code gave every child an equal share, so holdings subdivided in each generation until the typical farm today runs to three quarters of a hectare or less. The reform spared Haiti the pattern of huge estates beside tiny ones found across Latin America. It also left rulers who owned no working estates with one route to an income, which was taxing the peasants.

Marcus Rainsford's history of the revolution, the second influential British account of the event, makes an argument that Hormann finds startling. In his preface Rainsford sets out the paradox that despite the world historical transformation the revolution had wrought, it had been almost entirely eclipsed in contemporary historical discourse, and he explains the silence by the threat the event posed to the conceptual and ideological foundations of Western writing about history. Striking events that alter the condition of mankind are denied recognition by their contemporaries, he wrote, because attention is distracted by effects and because distant society recoils from anything that threatens a violation of its system or wounds a favourite prejudice. Hormann notes that Trouillot, who made the silencing of the revolution his central thesis nearly two centuries later, does not mention Rainsford at all. Where this account departs from the standard one: The chapter argues that Trouillot's thesis of comprehensive silencing is refuted by a contemporary British author who diagnosed that silencing himself, in terms close to Trouillot's own.