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approach our coasts, if not by the memory of the cruelty that they have inflicted, at least by the terrible resolution that we are about to take to devote to death, anyone born French, who would dirty with his sacrilegious foot the territory of liberty,” Dessalines said.
    The slave-rebels had beaten back the most powerful armies in Europe, overturned the prime economic engine of Enlightenment Europe, and struck the first victory in the war against slavery. And the vast Atlantic world of ships and slaves, of commerce and capital, could not help but take notice. In 1789, Saint Domingue exported 70,000 tons of sugar: by 1801, it exported only 9,000.
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    News traveled fast. Upon hearing of his brother-in-law’s defeat in Haiti, Napoleon pounded the table and cursed, “Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies.” A strategic mastermind, the emperor knew when to cut his losses—as well as where to focus his energies. While a republic in the New World would have been nice, Napoleon had to focus on Europe and simply could not afford the massive costs in men and pride of subduing Haiti or running sugar colonies in the New World. With Haiti in flames, he saw little use for his other New World colony, Louisiana.
    A headache to Napoleon, Louisiana was the apple of young America’s eyes. Louisiana had a strategic place in the North American continent: its capital, New Orleans, controlled the Mississippi River. With a valley double the size of the Egyptian Nile and a drainage basin only slightly smaller than the Amazon, the mighty river loomed as the central artery of the American heartland, embracing 41 percent of the North American continent in its watershed.
    As American settlers crossed the Appalachians and began to domesticate the West in the wake of their own successful revolution against the British from 1776 to 1783, they needed an outlet for their goods. The Mississippi River provided the only real channel for moving crops from the center of the continent out into the ocean and around back to the East Coast or to Europe; crossing the mountains by land was too great an obstacle. And just as the Mississippi River was the key to trans-Appalachian commerce, Louisiana—and New Orleans in specific—was the key to the Mississippi River. Guarding the outlet into the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans was the single most important strategic site in North America west of the Appalachians. And Thomas Jefferson and his fellow republicans knew it.
    But the demise of Saint Domingue and the rise of a free Haiti had wrought radical change on Louisiana society. Within a few short years, slave-rebels had sent the most profitable produce of the French empire up in smoke. Planters in Louisiana, at the time a military outpost surrounded by cotton, indigo, and sugar plantations, saw an opportunity for profit and rapidly began converting their fields for sugar production. An influx of Haitian refugees only added to the momentum. By 1802, a mere seven years after the first planter converted his entire plantation to sugar, Louisiana boasted seventy sugar plantations producing over 3,000 tons of sugar per year.
    While Louisiana’s yield still paled in comparison to what Haiti had produced in its prime, these numbers were enough to attract merchants from all over the eastern seaboard. By the turn of the century, sugar was becoming an increasingly common part of everyday life and demand was soaring. As Americans and Europeans drank more tea, smeared more syrup on their bread, baked more sweet cakes, and mixed more puddings and porridges, they needed more sources of raw sugar. Ships began to flock to New Orleans, where they filled their holds with what was fast becoming a staple of working-class diets. In a few short years after the slaves of Saint Domingue took up arms and formed themselves into a vast army, Louisiana was transformed from a small military outpost with a diverse agricultural mix into the center of the North American plantation world, one