Free men of colour, not ex-slaves, exported the revolution

Geggus draws a line inside the Haitian leadership. The privateers of the south coast who tried to start a rising at Maracaibo in 1799, the refugees driven out of the southern province by Louverture who landed on Curacao in 1800 with Petion among them, and Petion's later help to Miranda in 1806 and to Bolivar in 1816 all came from the same region, the south commanded by Andre Rigaud and dominated by the freeborn men of mixed descent known as anciens libres. It was they, and not the former slaves of the north, who sought to carry the revolution abroad. He adds that the aid mattered materially, since Bolivar's Venezuelan campaign was revived by Haitian assistance in 1816 and his moves against slavery there could hardly have been made without it. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus splits Haitian revolutionary internationalism by origin, crediting the southern anciens libres rather than the northern former slaves.

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.

Mina had reached Galveston in November after fog, contrary winds and an outbreak of yellow fever that killed fourteen men, stayed there until April reorganising what was left of the expedition, and resisted attempts to divert it to New Granada. He sailed on the seventh and landed eleven days later near Tampico. No time was lost in setting up a printing press to turn out proclamations for distribution through the country. His plan was to march to the best defended rebel strongholds, win the support of their fighting men, and take an army of perhaps ten thousand against the crown's forces at Mexico City. In early June he sent word to Sutherland in Haiti that the march inland had begun, and by July he had taken more than seven hundred prisoners and pushed deep into royalist territory.