Christophe's secretary cites the dead plotter to prove Haiti is safe

Writing for King Henry Christophe, the Baron de Dupuy answered foreign fears that Haiti intended to set the slave colonies alight by pointing at 1799. He asked rhetorically whether it was the king who had sent Sasportas and Dubuisson to Jamaica to stir up insurrection, and answered that the scheme belonged to the former French agent Roume, and that it was not a white man who had warned the British consul. Girard reads this as a governing habit rather than a one-off. Every Haitian constitution of the period, from Louverture's in 1801 through those of Dessalines, Petion and Christophe, carried an article renouncing foreign expeditions. Independence had to be paid for with a promise of quiet. The reassurance failed anyway, since Haiti kept its reputation as a dormant volcano in the region, and modern historians still credit it with exporting revolt it had in fact refused to export.

The expansion of the world economy that began in the first half of the eighteenth century and accelerated after 1750 ended, in Wallerstein's account, in the Franco British wars of 1792 to 1815, a stretch he describes as profitable turbulence. The turbulence was profitable because war on that scale redistributed markets and destroyed competitors while demand for supplies stayed high. The base for the expansion had been laid in the previous century, when the core countries pulled the most valuable activities inside their own frontiers, drove marginal producers out and redistributed just enough revenue at home to lift demand. What the wars settled was which of the two contenders would hold the advantage afterwards. They also emptied the Caribbean of French naval protection for years at a time, which is one of the conditions under which the enslaved population of Saint-Domingue fought and won.

Until the British landing of December 1814, France and the United States argued over whether French citizens living in Louisiana had to serve in the militia. The French consul in New Orleans drew up two lists of men entitled to exemption, seventy five names in all, most of them people who had come from Saint-Domingue by way of Cuba. When Andrew Jackson called the city to arms the lists proved worthless. By the consul's own account every Frenchman marched and one man claimed exemption. Of the white veterans of the Battalion of New Orleans whose birthplaces have been established, twenty eight in every hundred had come from Saint-Domingue. The battalion of free men of colour was made up of non white newcomers, commanded by a white refugee named Daquin with Savary as a captain under him. Two days before the battle the consul wrote that nationalities no longer counted and that they were all Americans now.

Garcia V was king of the Kongo from 1803 to 1830 and wanted a priest for the same reason his predecessors had, to perform the coronation and bless his marriage and so confirm his authority. He waited eleven years. In 1814 Luigi-Maria d'Assisi, the Capuchin prefect at Loanda, managed to spend eight months in the country, baptised twenty five thousand people, heard five thousand confessions, and on 17 March crowned and married Garcia and Queen Isabella. There had been no priest at Sao Salvador for twenty years. The delighted king wrote to his brother the King of Portugal, as Afonso I had learned to do three centuries earlier, and suggested the Pope make Luigi-Maria a cardinal. Garcia had sent a nephew to be educated in Loanda in 1803 and a son in 1809, insisting he must have a priest in the family; that son, Dom Pedro, was ordained in 1824.