The indemnity formula came from Petion, on a Louisiana model

Casimir puts the paternity of the indemnity where it is rarely put. The formula was found by Petion's Republic, though it was not actually instituted until Boyer's government in 1825. Its logic was to buy back from France the land the indigenous army had already conquered, and to compensate the dispossessed owners, on a model taken explicitly from the Louisiana Purchase. He reads the offer as evidence of the economic order Petion would have built had he had the means, and he notes that Boyer, his disciple and successor, then specified how the citizen attached to the earth was to be tied down and inaugurated a relationship of dependence toward the mother country. Casimir also doubts that reviving large export agriculture was the real objective, given how comprehensively that project had already failed for better-resourced predecessors. Where this account departs from the standard one: Credits the indemnity formula to Petion's Republic and to a Louisiana Purchase model, rather than treating it as a French demand imposed on Boyer.

The Cour Prevotale ended abruptly. Late in 1826 an order from the metropole suppressed it, and the reaction in Martinique was anger. The governor disbanded the court reluctantly while predicting that poisonings would climb again at once, and the slaveholders who had used it, and served on it, objected. Two years later, by a royal ordinance of September 1828, France applied the Napoleonic penal code of 1810 to its remaining Caribbean colonies, a code mentioning poison only as an instance of voluntary homicide and punishing divination and similar practices with a fine and a few days in jail. In 1831 the Martinique council drafted rules for applying the new law to enslaved people. The draft kept the old fear of societies formed to poison, and made the killing of an owner by any means a parricide, and for the first time in a century it treated sorcery and medicine as separate from poison.

In 1824 a man named Kinsley shipped a colony of enslaved people from Florida to the north coast of Hispaniola. His plan was to free them by a graduated process meant to run over several years. They saw that freedom was already within reach on the ground where they had landed and asserted it themselves shortly after arrival. They then settled on the banks of the Yasica, a small river crossing the well watered plain east of Puerto Plata, and became a quiet and hard working community. Along that stretch of coast they and their descendants were known for the rest of the century as the Kinsley boys. Fifty years later the land they held passed for the best cultivated and most productive on the island, the staple being sugar cane, to which that soil is well suited. Their case sat alongside a separate settlement of American emigrants of 1824 on the Samana peninsula.

Hormann tracks the closing and reopening of British argument about Haiti. Enthusiastic appraisals of the 1791 revolt by British abolitionists appear in 1791 and 1792 and then virtually stop after 1793, in abolitionist and radical writing alike, because members of parliament and the interests behind them recoiled from even discussing the end of the slave trade while it seemed likely to invite a repetition of events in the French colony. Thomas Clarkson, who had written on the revolt anonymously in 1792, mounted a very cautious defence of the Haitian Revolution again only in an essay of this year arguing for gradual emancipation in the British colonies. The chapter treats that thirty year silence as a political effect with datable causes, not as the boundary of what Europeans were capable of thinking.