Seven ships fitted out in Haiti sail for the Venezuelan coast

The first expedition from Los Cayos left harbour with seven vessels named for the men of the cause, including one called the Bolivar and another the Petion. The equipment came from Sutherland, who supplied a thousand guns, the ships themselves and thirty thousand pounds of gunpowder. Lewis treats the failure of the venture as well known and moves quickly past it. Within six months the royalists had beaten Bolivar back and he returned to Haiti, where Sutherland and Petion received him again. In a letter to the president that September he wrote that an almost impossible chain of circumstances had returned him to the island of free men and to the most generous republican leader in the New World. In early August he was invited back and, frustrated but not defeated, began preparing another expedition.

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.

Manigat opens by naming the historiographical obstacle. Haiti's first national historians, Madiou and Ardouin, agreed with different degrees of vehemence in stigmatising Christophe's regime as ferocious tyranny, painting it for posterity as a reign of arbitrariness and cruelty. Against that he proposes a category from European history: not a Haitian Ivan the Terrible but an enlightened despot, a ruler for whom progress is imposed from above by strong personal power because the mass of the governed is judged insufficiently educated to demand it. Christophe's education policy of 1806 to 1820 is presented in this frame, alongside Petion's agrarian policy of 1807 to 1818, as a school textbook exercise in seeing two contemporaries whole. Manigat insists that moving from legend to history is uncomfortable work and that the historian's job is to track the quarry rather than to please either camp. Where this account departs from the standard one: Rejects the portrait of Christophe as an arbitrary tyrant handed down by Madiou and Ardouin, reclassifying him as an enlightened despot.