Christophe keeps thirty two thousand men under arms in a country at peace

Haitian independence stayed precarious until France recognised it in 1825, and the first governments spent accordingly. In 1807 the Journal de l'Empire reported that Christophe seemed to fear a fresh French attack and was building fortresses in mountains already hard to reach, publishing monthly troop returns he put at seventy thousand men, a figure observers thought greatly exaggerated. By 1817 his army was estimated at thirty two thousand soldiers, in a period of relative calm between his kingdom in the north and the republic in the south under Alexandre Petion. The two states were at peace with each other and had agreed that a threat from Europe would bring them together in defence of independence. In 1814, when danger seemed near, eighty thousand muskets held in the arsenals were handed out to the population. More than a hundred and twenty thousand were later bought back and distributed across five departments, with bullet moulds and edged weapons given to every household.

Conditions in the Haitian capital were tightening. A French warship had arrived to blockade the port and stop rebel forces leaving, and its captain was reporting to Spanish officials in Cuba and promising to prevent Mina from sailing. Two weeks after Mina left, a Frenchman naturalised in Spain arrived from Cuba aboard a trading ship loaded with tobacco, sent by the captain general to spy on the expedition. Passing easily as a commercial agent selling contraband, he gained the confidence of both Sutherland and Bolivar within three days. With Mina gone he concentrated on Bolivar and collected a great deal about the plans for a second assault on the mainland. Lewis observes that had the man been sent to kill Bolivar he would have had little difficulty, since the two spent several days in each other's company. He simply gathered his information and left.

In 1818 two French medical writers, Fournier and Begim, published an attack on Felix Pascalis of New York. They called him a man who had never really been a doctor at all. Then they went further and named his connection in Saint-Domingue with the insurgent leader they called the pious Romain and with the camp at Trou Coffy, accusing him of presiding over the killing of white civilians and the mutilation of their bodies. Pascalis demanded two thousand dollars in damages. He also wrote to Jean Deveze in Paris, who had run the fever hospital at Bush Hill in Philadelphia in 1793, and obtained from him a signed declaration in February 1820 that his conduct during the Trou Coffy affair had deserved glory. To make his case he set down in 1821 a long memoir of what he had seen, the Anecdote historique. That document, written to save a medical reputation in Manhattan, is one of the fullest eyewitness accounts of any 1791 insurgency in the colony.

Girard follows the losing side of independence. Thousands of angry cultivators refused incorporation into Dessalines's army and chose instead to ally with the French commander Rochambeau, and even after the evacuation he went on fighting renegade bands numbering between fifteen hundred and four thousand, one of which called itself the Rochambeau army. He captured and executed their most prominent leader, but lower class opposition to the new landowning elite did not disappear. It took state form in the independent territory that Jean-Baptiste Perrier, known as Goman, held in the south for fourteen years, and reappeared in the Piquet risings of the eighteen forties. The article treats this continuity as the real long term consequence of the labour policy Dessalines had enforced first for Louverture and then for France.