Petion dies at forty-eight and the peasants mourn Papa Bon-Coeur

Bellegarde's account of the death is unusually frank about weakness. Petion was facing Christophe in the north and mounting trouble inside his own government, caught between his natural mildness and the demands of the powerful clique that had gathered around him, and perhaps wounded by the infidelity of Joute Lachenais, the one woman he had loved, who went on to marry his successor Boyer. He grew discouraged and, weakened, could not fight off the illness that took him. Bellegarde says his kindness sometimes shaded into indulgence and a tolerance close to weakness, that he gave away whatever he had, and that anyone who could move him to pity could obtain a pardon. The common people called him Papa Bon-Coeur, and the grief at his death exceeded anything in Haitian public life. His funeral oration, Bellegarde says, was a shout from an ordinary man that Petion made people weep only by dying. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

Within fifteen years of Waterloo the British islands produced three risings that rank among the biggest anywhere in the Americas: Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831. Geggus points out that the timing of each tracked a development in the antislavery movement in Britain, and that each set of rebels called for the enforcement of a freedom law they wrongly took to have passed at home and to be hidden by officials on the spot. He counts over twenty such episodes between 1789 and the early 1830s where the enslaved insisted that a law had already freed them, or had cut their week down to three days of work. He traces the syndrome back to an aborted rising on Martinique in August 1789 and connects it to reform efforts in England, France and Spain that slaveholders publicly resisted.

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.