1. W. Sypher, Guinea’s captive kings: British anti-slavery literature in the eighteenth century (Chapel Hill, 1942) pp. 19–23; T. Clarkson, History of the … abolition of the African slave trade (1808) vol. II, 210–12; R.I. and S. Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce (1838) vol. I, p. 296.
2. See D. Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution: the British occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–98 (Oxford, 1981) ch. 9, pt 1; Annual Register, 1796, p. 66, and 1797, pp. 121–6.
3. The passage is cited with suitably acidic commentary in C. L. R. James, The black Jacobins (New York, 1963) pp. 226–7.
4. Government policy was, after allowing the expedition to sail, to remain neutral and hope for a speedy victory, as did the British planters. Even the Colonial Secretary Lord Hobart, who was an abolitionist, considered ‘Toussaint’s Black Empire’ an ‘evil’: see H. Hughes, ‘British policy towards Haiti, 1801–1805’, Canadian Historical Review, XXV 4 (1944) 398. Yet only two years before a French attempt to raise a slave rebellion in Jamaica had been betrayed by Toussaint to the British: see PRO, CO 245/1, p. 34.
5. None the less, Charles Fox could still chide the British in 1803 for being more concerned with the Swiss, while regarding French inhumanity in St. Domingue as being beneficial to Britain’s commercial and military interests: see D. V. Erdman (ed.), The collected works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton, 1978) vol. III, pt i, p. 434 n.15.