A captured banner becomes French propaganda and forces a new flag

Madiou's version, which Girard reports before testing it, turns on a piece of information warfare. After the colonial officers defected from the French army in October 1802 they stripped French insignia from their regimental colours. In a fight near Croix-des-Bouquets that December the French took one of these banners and issued a pamphlet arguing that men still marching under the tricolor could not be seeking independence. Petion, in this account, then pressed Dessalines for a symbol that could not be read that way, and Dessalines produced a blue and red banner by removing the white band. The mechanism worth noting is that the flag was a reply to an enemy publication rather than a spontaneous act of defiance. Girard treats this chain as Madiou's reconstruction rather than as documented fact, and notes that Ardouin later removed the theatrical elements while keeping the order to adopt blue and red.

Henriette Saint-Marc was known in Port-au-Prince as a quiet and respectable woman who walked with her eyes down past the barracks of the old regiments of Artois, Guyenne and Normandy. When the generals at Arcahaie ran short of powder and shot she began obtaining both from French soldiers, by whatever means were available to her, and she was one of many women doing it. Pamphile de Lacroix, who wrote the history of the Leclerc expedition, confirms that the guerrillas were supplied this way. One evening in December 1802, on the slope of the morne de Desprez, the officer paying court to her turned out to be an agent of the maréchaussée who had been watching her for weeks. He put irons on her wrists and took her to the Artois barracks. A quick court martial sentenced her to hang. She was executed the next day on the square in front of the cathedral. That evening Rochambeau's palace held a ball with illuminations and speeches.

On 9 February 1804 a vessel called the Good Hope wrecked near Higuey, on the eastern coast of Santo Domingo. She carried captives for sale, had a mostly British crew and a British captain, and sailed under the Danish flag, having touched at Saint Croix and Havana before making for Santo Domingo. On 18 March the board that General Jean Louis Ferrand used to judge captured ships ruled that everything aboard was forfeit, including the 185 people listed as cargo, and ordered them sold. The sale raised 81,400 francs. Ferrand's government was short of money and leaned on ship seizures to pay its soldiers and its clerks, justifying many of them as punishment for trading with Haiti. Two years later 187 people from the same wreck were resold in Santo Domingo city by a merchant from Saint Thomas. Whatever their legal status had been before the wreck, paperwork now recorded them as property.

Writing to her legal representative, Marie Bunel asked him to protect and watch over the people she called her former subjects, and appended a list of fourteen Black individuals set out the way prerevolutionary estate inventories were written, with each person's skills and offspring recorded. She added that she wished all governmental laws and regulations applying to them to be enforced, including any the government might pass in future. Girard reads the request precisely. France had already restored slavery in Guadeloupe that year and was widely believed to be preparing the same in Saint-Domingue, and a restoration would not have touched her own freedom, since she belonged to the anciens libres whose liberty predated the revolution. The letter is therefore a statement of readiness to reclaim human property. Free women of colour in the colony had owned and traded enslaved people, and she had almost certainly been among them. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard shows a Black freedwoman of the revolutionary generation positioning herself to recover people she had owned if France reimposed slavery.