Nine thousand people from Saint Domingue land at New Orleans

In 1809 New Orleans took in 9,059 people from Saint Domingue who had been living in Cuba: 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of colour and 3,226 enslaved. Louisiana already held the largest refugee population in the United States, spread through New Orleans and the parishes around it, and it drew people a second time from New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore who went there to join relatives and the French speaking population already in place. Others reached it after stays in Jamaica, Martinique, Guadeloupe or Cuba. The arrivals raised the number of skilled and professional workers across the lower South. They also carried their religion with them, and the organised practice known in New Orleans as voodoo is most likely owed to this influx. Their descendants stayed a distinct group of free people of colour for generations, which is why a committee in New Orleans could still act as a community in the 1890s.

On 7 November 1808 General Jean Louis Ferrand marched about six hundred men toward Seybo, in eastern Santo Domingo, to put down a rising led by an officer he had once trusted with the district. He believed the sight of him would restore order and that any resistance would break easily. Waiting for him were 2,100 soldiers sent from Havana and Puerto Rico. The battle was one sided. Ferrand ordered the survivors to withdraw, said aloud that he was the victim of his own overconfidence, took a cartridge from an aide before anyone could stop him, primed his pistols and killed himself. He had soldiered for twenty five years, through the American and French revolutions, and had run the last French government in Hispaniola for almost five. His second in command, General Joseph Barquier, took over a position that was already lost. Six weeks later a junta named Juan Sanchez Ramirez governor in the name of Ferdinand VII.

Geggus is blunt about the aftermath. Rome broke off relations once the massacres of 1804 were known, and foreign governments withheld recognition for decades, in sharp contrast to their embrace of the Latin American states that became independent in the 1820s. But Haiti was never commercially isolated, despite a United States trade embargo lasting from 1806 to 1810, and it remained an important coffee producer even though the new state could export barely a quarter of its earlier output with thousands of plantations and several towns burned. Its rulers spent decades trying to hold the plantation system together, and the country became instead a nation of peasant smallholders, unique in the Americas. In 1807 it split along regional and class lines into two warring states and stayed divided until 1820. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus rejects the widespread claim that independent Haiti was commercially isolated, and argues that despite the popularity of the phrase black republic the state Dessalines created was a military autocracy, the Republic of Haiti being founded only in 1806 after his assassination.

Writing to the minister of marine on 25 August, Leclerc reported that he had just discovered a large conspiracy aimed at raising the entire colony, placed its intended date at the end of Thermidor and explained its failure by the absence of a chief. De Young converts that to roughly the sixteenth of August. The significance for his argument is that the revolt of Belair and Larose was not a local affair but one strand of a general rising by the guerrilla commanders. Within a week of the letter the principal bands were in the field. Sans Souci took up arms at Dondon the following day, Petit Noel on the twenty ninth, and at the same moment Macaya, Mavougou and Va Malheureux moved with Lamour Derance to take possession of the central plains and the northern ranges.