Nine thousand refugees from Cuba double French New Orleans

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.

Eleven British warships entered the harbour of Santo Domingo city on 11 May 1809. Troops came ashore on 28 June and were inside the city walls the following day under Commodore William Pryce Cumby. The capitulation was signed on 6 July. Its three signatories were Hugh Lyle Carmichael, a British major general, Juan Sanchez Ramirez for Spain, and the French commander Joseph Barquier. French troops were to give up Santo Domingo city and every other post of importance and sail for France within twelve days, British troops would hold those posts until the evacuation was complete, and a prisoner exchange was to begin at once. 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 promised that individual and personal property of every description would be respected. In a colony where thousands of people had been classed as property, that sentence carried a second meaning.

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.