Louverture keeps France's flag and takes France's authority

Without declaring independence, Louverture removed the representatives of the French government from their military and administrative posts and filled them himself, keeping the formal tie to France while making the colony autonomous in fact. Dupuy cites Schoelcher's biography for the reading in Paris, that Bonaparte was effectively being notified of a coup. What Louverture wanted, on Dupuy's account, was a specific and unusual settlement: the former enslaved would become French citizens, Saint-Domingue would remain a French colony but govern itself, and the plantation system and the commercial link to France would be preserved because he did not believe the colony could survive alone. That required former planters to keep their estates and former slaves to return to them, now as paid workers. He therefore opposed breaking up the plantations into the subsistence holdings the freedpeople wanted.

Sanite Belair of Verrettes married Charles Belair, an aide de camp of Toussaint Louverture and his nephew, who was made a brigadier general and given command of Arcahaie. In August 1802 the couple raised the Seventh colonial demi-brigade and most of the population of Verrettes and took to the hills of the Cahos, after the disarmings, drownings, hangings and the killing of the wives of several officers of that same demi-brigade. She was captured at Corail-Mirault. Her husband, who was not far away, surrendered so as to share her captivity. Leclerc received Dessalines's letter announcing the arrest on 12 September 1802 and appointed a commission that met six hours after the prisoners reached Cap. On 5 October 1802 that commission, four white officers and Clervaux, considered his rank and her sex and sentenced him to be shot and her to be beheaded. She fought the executioner, refused to kneel, and was shot in the end.

Britain handed Martinique back to France in September 1802 and left behind between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred prisoners of colour taken during the occupation. All of them were free under French law. The new French governor of the island considered dumping them on the coast of Venezuela among people he called savages. A man named Delpech then offered to take five hundred off his hands, promising to repay the British for their upkeep, to strand the most troublesome in Central America and to dispose of the rest as he saw fit. Two brigs escorted by the corvette Berceau sailed with them. Officials at Cumana and on the isthmus had been warned by the earlier Guadeloupe voyage and would not buy. The ships then put one hundred and fifty men ashore on the Miskito Coast of what is now Nicaragua, chained together in pairs, with two weeks of food. When the flotilla anchored at Santo Domingo in October, eighty five of the original five hundred were still aboard.

Captain Marcus Rainsford of the West India regiment published a thirty-page memoir in January 1802 recounting his misadventures in Santo Domingo in 1799, when a hurricane forced his ship into port, he met Toussaint, played billiards with him, was arrested as a suspected spy, condemned by a military jury and then released on Toussaint's intervention. Pierrot notes that the book ran against the grain at the moment of publication, when English opinion supported the Leclerc expedition. Rainsford argued that an independent Haiti posed no threat to British colonies, that the revolutionaries had no wish to attack them, and that the French expedition would fail for logistical and moral reasons. The mechanism of the book's limitation is that it defended Toussaint as an individual rather than the political force behind him, which is the separation Pierrot's whole argument tracks.