Petion refuses the title of author of American liberty

Bolivar had come from Jamaica in the last days of December 1815 after his first attempts against Spain failed, and Petion gave him money, arms, ammunition, supplies, ships and a small printing press, with some Haitians enlisting under his flag. On 8 February Bolivar wrote proposing that the Haitian president be named author of American liberty in every document addressed to the people of Venezuela, so as to leave posterity a permanent monument to his philanthropy. Petion declined the honour and asked as his only payment that slavery be completely abolished wherever the Liberator's arms prevailed. The expedition sailed from Les Cayes in April, Bolivar landed at Campano on 31 May, took Ocumare on 3 July, and on 6 July proclaimed the abolition of slavery in Spanish America, having already freed fifteen hundred people he owned himself at San Mateo.

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.

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.

The three largest British Caribbean revolts came after the Napoleonic war, in Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831, and Geggus ties each to a stage in the antislavery campaign in Britain. In every case the insurgents demanded that the authorities implement a law abolishing slavery which they believed London had passed and which local officials were suppressing. No such law existed. He counts more than twenty risings and plots between 1789 and the early 1830s built on this belief, sometimes including a claim that the working week had been cut to three days, and traces the pattern back to an aborted rising in Martinique in August 1789. The mechanism is a rumour of powerful allies, part wishful thinking and part deliberate manipulation by leaders, which sharpened the sense of injustice into action.