The fish market storerooms are cleared to house arriving families

Hearing that as many as six thousand people might be on their way, James Mather, mayor of New Orleans, went to the municipal council on 17 May 1809 with emergency measures. He proposed moving the fish market to a vacant lot so that its five storerooms could shelter families, collecting blankets for those with nothing, and forming a committee to find money and work. The council agreed a week later. By August the committee had gathered and handed out five thousand dollars and was asking for a second round of subscriptions, because people were still landing. That figure is worth setting beside the public revenue. Property owners in New Orleans paid seven thousand six hundred and fifty dollars in tax on real estate and slaves for the fiscal year that began in May 1809, at a rate of one dollar for every thousand dollars of property. Private charity in three months came to two thirds of what the parish raised in a year.

In 1809 Alexandre Petion, ruling the southern republic after Haiti split in two, decided to break up the large estates and distribute land to his officers and soldiers. It was the first land reform in the history of Latin America. Henry Christophe in the north followed in 1819. Petion had little choice. The French market was gone, the Napoleonic wars made trade with Britain and the United States difficult, and keeping export production going with troops standing over the workers had become too expensive. Inheritance rules taken from the Napoleonic Code gave every child an equal share, so holdings subdivided in each generation until the typical farm today runs to three quarters of a hectare or less. The reform spared Haiti the pattern of huge estates beside tiny ones found across Latin America. It also left rulers who owned no working estates with one route to an income, which was taxing the peasants.

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.

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.