Still terrified at the prospect of a successful republic organized by freed African slaves Jefferson took no action to block Napoleon's thrust into the New World.
In 1802, a French expeditionary force achieved initial success against the slave army, driving L'Ouverture's forces back into the mountains. But, as they retreated, the ex-slaves torched the cities and the plantations, destroying the colony's once-thriving economic infrastructure.
L'Ouverture, hoping to bring the war to an end, accepted Napoleon's promise of a negotiated settlement that would ban future slavery in the country. As part of the agreement, L'Ouverture turned himself in.
Napoleon, however, broke his word. Jealous of L'Ouverture, who was regarded by some admirers as a general with skills rivaling Napoleon's, the French dictator had L'Ouverture shipped in chains back to Europe where he was mistreated and died in prison.
Foiled Plans
Infuriated by the betrayal, L'Ouverture's young generals resumed the war with a vengeance. In the months that followed, the French army already decimated by disease was overwhelmed by a fierce enemy fighting in familiar terrain and determined not to be put back into slavery.
Napoleon sent a second French army, but it too was destroyed. Though the famed general had conquered much of Europe, he lost 24,000 men, including some of his best troops, in St. Domingue before abandoning his campaign.
The death toll among the ex-slaves was much higher, but they had prevailed, albeit over a devastated land.
By 1803, a frustrated Napoleon denied his foothold in the New World agreed to sell New Orleans and the Louisiana territories to Jefferson. Ironically, the Louisiana Purchase, which opened the heart of the present United States to American settlement, had been made possible despite Jefferson's misguided collaboration with Napoleon.
"By their long and bitter struggle for independence, St. Domingue's blacks were instrumental in allowing the United States to more than double the size of its territory," wrote Stanford University professor John Chester Miller in his book, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery.
But, Miller observed, "the decisive contribution made by the black freedom fighters " went almost unnoticed by the Jeffersonian administration."
The loss of L'Ouverture's leadership dealt a severe blow to Haiti's prospects, according to Jefferson scholar Paul Finkelman of Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
"Had Toussaint lived, it's very likely that he would have remained in power long enough to put the nation on a firm footing, to establish an order of succession," Finkelman told me in an interview. "The entire subsequent history of Haiti might have been different."
Instead, the island nation continued a downward spiral.
In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the radical slave leader who had replaced L'Ouverture, formally declared the nation's independence and returned it to its original Indian name, Haiti. A year later, apparently fearing a return of the French and a counterrevolution, Dessalines ordered the massacre of the remaining French whites on the island.
Though the Haitian resistance had blunted Napoleon's planned penetration of the North American mainland, Jefferson reacted to the shocking bloodshed in Haiti by imposing a stiff economic embargo on the island nation. In 1806, Dessalines himself was brutally assassinated, touching off a cycle of political violence that would haunt Haiti for the next two centuries.
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