A band of well born rapists and the word that outlived them

In 1812 the women and girls of Port-au-Prince did not go out after dark. A band of upper class men led by one Cadet Jacques was seizing and raping them, and it had no connection to any of the military campaigns then dividing the country. The threat was constant enough that the name attached itself to the crime. The ordinary Haitian Creole word for rape is kadejak, and it very probably descends from this man's name. A woman describing what was done to her says li fe kadejak sou mwen. There is a rival account tracing the word to an American marine called Jack during the occupation of 1915 to 1934, though the 1812 origin has more behind it. The same year saw Christophe's soldiers rape and kill women of mixed descent across the north and the Artibonite. Cadet Jacques belonged to no army and answered to nobody, and it is his name the language kept.

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.

Geggus treats the conspiracy organised in Havana by the free black carpenter José Antonio Aponte as the most striking instance of Haitian influence on slave resistance elsewhere. He is careful about the general claim. News spread wide and fast, with Jamaican slaves singing about the North Plain rising within a month, but contemporaries and historians have often exaggerated the importance of the factor. His larger irony is economic: by driving up world prices for tropical produce and creating a refugee diaspora that settled new land in Cuba, Jamaica, Louisiana and Trinidad, the revolution spread slavery to new frontiers and revived older plantation economies. Although it freed half a million people directly and more than six hundred thousand across the French colonies, and closed the slave trade's largest market, the overall volume of the Atlantic trade scarcely fell from its peak in the 1780s. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus argues it is difficult to believe fear of rebellion was a major factor in outlawing the slave trade, and holds that Britain abolished its trade in 1807 not from fear of West Indian revolt but because the revolution had destroyed France as a colonial rival, freeing British politicians to vote their consciences.

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.