Christophe answers his rival's re-election by making himself king

Wilson puts the two events in direct sequence. Petion was re-elected on 9 March 1811, and on 26 March Christophe declared himself King Henry I. The apparatus followed at once. A constitution of 4 April established a hereditary monarchy passing through the eldest son and created an aristocracy of four princes, eight dukes, twenty-two counts, thirty-seven barons and fourteen knights, each with a prescribed uniform modelled on European ranks. He founded the Royal and Military Orders of Saint Henry, which carried land grants for the highest dignitaries, appointed nine governors for seven castles, and staffed a court. Wilson reads the whole design as instrumental rather than vain. A monarchy with rank, protocol and titles was legible to European powers in a way that a Black republic was not, and legibility was what Christophe wanted from them.

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.

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.

Girard follows the losing side of independence. Thousands of angry cultivators refused incorporation into Dessalines's army and chose instead to ally with the French commander Rochambeau, and even after the evacuation he went on fighting renegade bands numbering between fifteen hundred and four thousand, one of which called itself the Rochambeau army. He captured and executed their most prominent leader, but lower class opposition to the new landowning elite did not disappear. It took state form in the independent territory that Jean-Baptiste Perrier, known as Goman, held in the south for fourteen years, and reappeared in the Piquet risings of the eighteen forties. The article treats this continuity as the real long term consequence of the labour policy Dessalines had enforced first for Louverture and then for France.