Two 1811 risings led by men who had lived through the Haitian war

Geggus separates a category of risings led by French speaking people known or presumed to have come from Saint-Domingue or Haiti, who had therefore watched the revolution at close range. The Louisiana insurrection of 1811 under the slave driver Charles Deslondes was the largest in North American history and belongs to this group. So does a revolt planned the same year at Saint Pierre in Martinique, which never got off the ground and whose leader had served in the Haitian army and kept contact with Haitian expatriates on Curacao. Tula's rebellion on Curacao in 1795 fits too, one participant declaring in French that they were there to win or die. Cuba supplies many further cases from 1795 down to the Ladder conspiracy of 1843, along with Louisiana, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Cartagena and Marie Galante.

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.

Soon after Henri Christophe was crowned in the north of Haiti in 1811, the free black carpenter Jose Antonio Aponte began a conspiracy in Havana and drew pictures of revolutionary leaders as a way of raising consciousness among those he approached. Geggus places the episode in a longer Cuban sequence. Five years earlier enslaved people on plantations near Havana had planned to take the city's forts so they could be free as those in Saint-Domingue were and become masters of the land, and in 1796 Africans planning a revolt in Spanish Santo Domingo went for advice to Saint-Domingue insurgents settled nearby. In several of these cases the promise of Haitian help was a morale device rather than a fact, and in Aponte's plot a free black man went so far as to impersonate the Saint-Domingue leader Jean-Francois.

In January 1810, with the last ships from Cuba still arriving, Governor William Claiborne set down his view of the population he now governed. He confessed apprehension that disorder might break out in a place so mixed and growing more mixed every day. He put the number of free men of colour in and around New Orleans capable of bearing arms at not less than eight hundred, counting those recently landed from Cuba. He allowed that their conduct so far had been correct. He then added that in a country with so large a black population they should be carefully watched. He had already asked the American consul at Santiago de Cuba to steer the remaining French elsewhere, and in November he made the same request of the American agent in Jamaica, saying that Louisiana already had a greater proportion of that kind of population than suited its interests. A rising of enslaved people broke out upriver the following year.