The fortress is done and 150 foreign ships load in the north

By this year Wilson has the Citadelle complete and the northern economy at its height. He puts the human cost at two hundred thousand men conscripted and twenty thousand dead, and says that given the scale of the project the figures are probably sound, a judgement most historians would not accept. More than half a million tons of material went into an irregular quadrilateral with a rounded bastion and a triangular spur, walls three metres thick, chambers up to forty-five metres high, magazines, cisterns, barracks and cells, provisioned for a garrison of fifteen hundred to hold out three years, with two hundred and seventy-five iron and bronze guns hauled up paths where a slip meant death. Wilson says no trace of ramps survives and no archival record explains how the guns were raised. In the same year a hundred and fifty foreign vessels, many British and American, loaded coffee, sugar, tobacco, indigo, cocoa and molasses. Where this account departs from the standard one: The figures of 200,000 conscripted labourers and 20,000 deaths are Wilson's, and he defends them as plausible; they are far above the numbers other accounts give.

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.

Haiti's secretary general B. Inginac wrote to the antislavery American James Tredwell inviting people of colour in the United States to emigrate to the republic. Tredwell, who had already visited Haiti, printed the letter in his 1818 book on the Haitian constitution, and the Niles Weekly Register republished it in October 1818 under a headline about people of colour. Daut contrasts the publicity here with the secrecy around Petion's support for Bolivar. Free soil was a doctrine the government wanted the Atlantic world to know about: anyone escaping slavery who reached Haitian ground was free, and the invitation extended that principle into an offer of citizenship for free Black Americans. Ministers issued public statements to the same effect. The policy fixed Haiti in the minds of Black Americans as a real alternative jurisdiction for decades, and was later broadened under Boyer.

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.