After a private loss, Marie Bunel finally goes back to Haiti

Girard reconstructs the decision from fragments. Her relatives at Cap Henry had begged her for years to come, without effect, and she had stayed where the money was, selling clothes to Haitian customers, summering on a farm in Bucks County, upgrading her signature from woman Bunel to Madame Bunel and marking it with the three dots of a mason. Then in August 1810 she fell ill and paid for a young girl's burial, two facts he reads as a miscarriage or an infant death. In September a gift of mango and guava preserves arrived from Madame Christophe. In October she signed a power of attorney to Antoine Laussat and soon after sailed for the Black republic she had held at a distance for eight years. The following year Christophe seized property belonging to American merchants in reprisal for a Baltimore fraud, costing her husband nearly eighteen thousand gourdes.

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.

Dupuy describes the post-independence state as divided from the start between the older property-owning and slave-owning affranchis, usually called mulattoes although the group included Black members, and a newer Black property-owning class formed during Louverture's rule and after independence. Their fight for control of the state produced fourteen years of civil war before Boyer reunited the country. Dupuy's argument is about consequences rather than personalities. The factional conflict blocked any developmental project, and the class structure it left behind, a dominant class living off commerce, finance and import and export tied to the world market and the state, and a peasantry growing food and some export crops, made industrialisation impossible in the nineteenth century. That weakness is what let French, English, German and later American capital take a dominant position by the end of the century, in what he calls a neocolonial turn.

Between May 1809 and January 1810 the mayor of New Orleans counted nine thousand and fifty nine people arriving from eastern Cuba, most of them out of Santiago de Cuba and Baracoa, with only one vessel coming from Havana. Further landings in the early months of 1810 carried the total past ten thousand. The mayor sorted them into the three legal categories that had governed Saint-Domingue and that also governed Louisiana. Two thousand seven hundred and thirty one were counted as white, three thousand one hundred and two as free people of colour, and three thousand two hundred and twenty six as slaves. The three groups were almost equal in size. Orleans Parish had held seventeen thousand people in 1806. The arrivals came to more than the entire growth of the white and enslaved populations of the parish between 1806 and 1810, and they roughly doubled the population of the city itself.