The 1802 Expedition to Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and the Louisiana Purchase

Colonial policies of Napoleon Bonaparte

When Napoleon seized power with the coup d’état of November 1799, the situation in France’s colonies was varied. After the Saint-Domingue slave revolt of 1791 and the abolition law passed by the Convention in 1794, slavery was no longer legal in the French colonial empire. But in practice, slavery persisted in Martinique, which was under British occupation, as well as the island of Réunion, where planters refused to implement the abolition law. In Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana, slaves were granted the legal status of cultivators, which made them officially free and guaranteed them a salary but also forced them to continue working on plantations. Meanwhile, free people of color such as Toussaint Louverture in Saint-Domingue and Louis Delgrès in Guadeloupe took political control after pushing out officers and civil commissioners sent from France. 

Napoleon lamented the decline of the colonial trade, which conservative colonists attributed to the abolition of slavery, and he suspected Louverture of preparing the independence of Saint-Domingue. But he could not act as long as the naval war with Britain prevented him from dispatching military forces to the Antilles. The preliminary peace protocols signed in October 1801, later confirmed by the Peace of Amiens, changed the situation. During the winter of 1801-1802, he sent various squadrons across the Atlantic to depose the officers of color who ruled Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe and take effective control of Martinique and Louisiana (the latter, which France had ceded to Spain after the Seven Years’ War, was retroceded to France under the 1800 Treaty of San Ildefonso).

In the long term, Napoleon hoped to bring the French colonial empire in the Caribbean back to its prerevolutionary economic apex. He stated that he had no intent to restore slavery in Saint-Domingue, but the law of May 20th, 1802 maintained slavery where it had not been effectively abolished (i.e. Martinique and Réunion) while leaving the door open to a future restoration of slavery in other colonies such as Saint-Domingue.

The Leclerc expedition

The largest of the expeditions that set sail in the winter of 1801-1802 involved about 40,000 sailors and soldiers. It was bound for Saint-Domingue, which had been the largest exporter of sugar and coffee in the world prior to the Revolution. It was led by the brother-in-law of Napoleon, General Victoire Leclerc (Napoleon’s sister Pauline and his brother Jérôme also accompanied the expedition). French troops landed simultaneously in various ports of Saint-Domingue in February 1802 and launched military operations after the failure of negotiations with Toussaint Louverture. 

The army under Louverture’s command, toughened by a decade of combat against French colonists and British and Spanish invaders, adopted a scorched-earth strategy, burned the colony’s main ports, including Cap-Français (today: Cap-Haïtien), and waged a guerilla war in the colony’s interior. Fighting proved deadly for Leclerc’s soldiers, most notably during the battle of Ravine-à-Couleuvres and the siege of the fort of Crête-à-Pierrot, but French forces eventually prevailed and Louverture had to agree to a ceasefire in April 1802. Leclerc then exiled Louverture to France, where he died in the fort of Joux in April 1803 (there is now a plaque in his honor in the Pantheon in Paris, where a second plaque also honors the memory of Delgrès, who killed himself during the reconquest of Guadeloupe).

Leclerc’s military situation worsened during the summer of 1802 when a yellow fever epidemic ravaged the expeditionary army. He did not officially restore slavery in Saint-Domingue for fear of losing the support of the black troops who had joined the French side during the ceasefire, but the law of May 20th, 1802 and the gradual restoration of slavery in Guadeloupe convinced many black cultivators to rebel for fear of losing their freedom. In the fall of 1802, most soldiers and officers of color in the colony joined ranks with rebellious cultivators, including Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a former slave who had been Louverture’s second-in-command. 

Unable to contain the rebellion, Leclerc made plans to kill the entire adult black population of the island, and he drowned rebel prisoners by the thousands (the term ‘genocide’ did not yet exist, so he described this as a ‘war of extermination’). He died of yellow fever in November 1802, but his successor Donatien de Rochambeau continued this policy of extermination and employed dogs from Cuba to hunt down and devour the rebels.

Failure of the expedition, the Louisiana Purchase, and Haiti’s independence

Despite the arrival of several waves of reinforcements from France, the military situation became critical for Rochambeau early in 1803. Yellow fever continued to be deadly. Dessalines eliminated his rivals and unified the rebel army. The Peace of Amiens with Britain ended in May 1803, thus preventing Napoleon from sending further reinforcements. The British navy then imposed a naval blockade of the main ports of Saint-Domingue while the army of Dessalines controlled the interior of Saint-Domingue and besieged the French garrisons. Caught between British ships and Dessalines’s soldiers, the ports under French control fell one by one. 

The failure of the Saint-Domingue expedition contributed to the Louisiana Purchase. When Napoleon sent expeditions to the Caribbean in early 1802, he also planned to send a fleet to Louisiana. But its departure was put on hold because Dutch ports were still frozen. The many reinforcements sent to Saint-Domingue in 1802 then complicated the planned expedition to Louisiana. Early in 1803, when it became obvious that the Saint-Domingue expedition was doomed, Napoleon abandoned his imperial projects in the Americas, including in Louisiana, a secondary colony whose main purpose was to provide Saint-Domingue with wood and foodstuffs. When the Peace of Amiens ended and the war with Britain resumed, Napoleon abruptly sold Louisiana to emissaries of US President Thomas Jefferson.

In November 1803, Dessalines won the battle of Vertières and Rochambeau evacuated Cap-Français, the last major town still under French control. Survivors of the expedition left for Santo Domingo in the eastern part of Hispaniola (today: Dominican Republic) or were intercepted by the British navy during the evacuation. After expelling the French from the colony, Dessalines formally declared Haiti’s independence on January 1st, 1804. His declaration of independence reaffirmed the unconditional principle of abolition. Dessalines also ordered the massacre of most of the remaining white colonists for fear that they might encourage Napoleon to send another expedition. 

Because Napoleon and his successors continued to regard Haiti as a rebel colony, France only recognized Haiti’s independence in 1825 in exchange for the payment of 150 million francs. In 2003, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide demanded the repayment of this indemnity with compounded interest because he saw it as the root cause of Haiti’s current economic problems, but France refused.

Published in december 2024