Petion sells food to the besieged French garrison he once fought

Barquier held Santo Domingo with about six hundred effectives against a Spanish army of six or seven thousand and a British naval blockade. He asked Turreau in the United States for supplies, which the British turned back, then sent an emissary to Petion rather than to Christophe, who was firmly allied to England. Petion received the envoy courteously, praised the defence, agreed to sell the food requested, and offered to let French vessels resupply in Haitian ports under neutral colours. He also advised Barquier to send his non-combatants to Les Cayes and march his garrison to Port-au-Prince for passage to the United States. Most of the food shipments were intercepted by the British. With the town under nightly shelling and 1,400 English marines preparing to land, Barquier capitulated. Roughly a thousand soldiers and civilians were ferried to Jamaica, thirteen of them bearing Polish surnames.

Napoleon Bonaparte had removed Ferdinand VII from the Spanish throne and put his own brother Joseph in his place. Spanish subjects in Cuba refused to accept the substitution, and their anger fell on the French planters and craftsmen who had settled among them after fleeing Saint-Domingue. On 12 March 1809 the Marques de Someruelos, captain general of Cuba, issued a proclamation ordering a vigilance committee in every town and every parish to look into the conduct and the opinions of the French living there and to expel anyone whose presence seemed dangerous. The committees worked fast. News of the expulsion orders reached Louisiana in April, probably carried on the same vessels as the first people driven out. Many of those expelled had already rebuilt their lives once after leaving Saint-Domingue, and among them they had established five hundred estates in eastern Cuba. They now lost a second set of properties and went looking for a third country.

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.