Nine thousand refugees double the population of New Orleans

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.

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.

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.