A speech in Cadiz sets off revolts across the Spanish Caribbean

When a deputy at the Cortes of Cadiz proposed in 1811 to end slavery in Spain's colonies, the proposal travelled to the Caribbean as a report of an accomplished fact. Revolts and conspiracies followed in each of the Spanish Antilles and in Martinique across 1811 and 1812. Geggus records one district of Puerto Rico where the rumour fused with news from Haiti and Henry Christophe was cast as the monarch who would liberate them. Similar hybrids appear elsewhere, including a conspiracy in Maranhao in northeastern Brazil in 1827 in which British liberators were expected to invade on behalf of the King of Congo, and plots at Ponce in Puerto Rico in 1841 and in the Cuban Escalera affair of 1843 where help was awaited from Haiti and from abolitionists at the same time. Metropolitan reform reliably produced colonial insurrection by way of misreported news.

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.

After the murder of Dessalines in 1806 Haiti split in two. Henry Christophe, born in Grenada, ruled the north with a coercive labour regime built on Toussaint's model. Alexandre Petion ran a republic in the south and west with a reputation for letting things be. The difference showed in what each did with state land. In the north the state leased its estates to dignitaries and generals. In the south it distributed them as private property, though officers and senior officials still took the largest share, and sharecropping settled in as the normal arrangement on holdings carved into two, three or five carreaux. Large estates, military strongmen and a labour code survived in both halves. Petion's lighter touch came from weakness, since he never held his generals the way Christophe held his. In 1810 Rigaud raised the south as a separate state, and it lasted until his successor rejoined Petion in 1812.

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.