Petion sells the state's land cheaply and creates the peasantry

Gerlus dates the decisive break in the southern republic to the end of 1809, when Petion's government began both to give state land to soldiers and army officers and to put large domains on sale at prices low enough that thousands of Haitians could buy a plot. He calls this the ticket by which the population entered the peasantry. The economic consequence was immediate and, from the rulers' point of view, ruinous. Export production fell as smallholders turned to food crops for their families and the local market and let sugar and coffee go. Large owners who still wanted export crops now had no way to get labour, since nearly everyone had land of their own and the planters lacked the money to pay wages. A subsequent sharecropping law offering tenants small plots in return for half the sugar crop failed outright, defeated by the seasonal rhythm of cane and by the independence a garden plot conferred.

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.

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.

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.