Nineteenth-century historians handed down a damning sequence: Dessalines betrayed Charles Belair, Toussaint Louverture's nephew, to the French, and was rewarded six weeks later with command of the revolutionary army. De Young finds this implausible. Officers such as Petion, Christophe and Clervaux, and thousands of guerrilla fighters, would hardly have submitted to a man who had just delivered Belair to Leclerc.

Working from the Rochambeau papers, he prints the report of Commandant Repussard, who actually made the capture. It shows Belair taken by a National Guard detachment sent from the far bank on Jablonowski's orders, found with surprising ease, and it shows Repussard forbidden to fire and frightened enough of his own superiors to ask for protection.

On this reading, the letter Leclerc published over Dessalines's name recorded a fait accompli, and was circulated to embarrass him and cut him off from the insurgents rather than to expose treachery.