A priest's servant warns Dessalines with a movement of her hand

In October 1802 Petion had taken up arms at Haut du Cap and Dessalines was preparing to do the same at Petite-Riviere, after a secret understanding between them. The French had already tried to arrest him at Gonaives, and he had ridden straight at the officer sent to take him and demanded where the slanders about him came from, which was enough to unsettle the men. At Petite-Riviere he pulled down a gallows the French had put up and then went to the presbytery, where the priest Videau had invited him to lunch. Chief of brigade Andrieux was at the table waiting for the moment to have him seized. A woman of colour, Madame Pageot, who worked as Videau's servant, appeared in the doorway opposite Dessalines and made him understand with a movement of her hand that he was about to be bound. He said he saw smoke on the mountain, went out, mounted, and fired the alarm cannon. Three thousand peasants came.

Haitian historians have often argued that Louverture aimed all along at an independent state. Geggus reports that most scholars disagree and sets out the reasoning. He already had independence in fact, and a formal break would have brought a French attack and probably a naval blockade by the slaveholding British and Americans as well. In a hostile world, as long as the French Republic stood against slavery and racial discrimination, people of colour in its colonies were better off remaining colonial subjects. On this reading independence was adopted in the Haitian Revolution as a last resort and only to protect what the revolution had already won. It was Bonaparte's aggression that precipitated the separation. Geggus also notes that the citizenship promised in 1794 proved illusory, since the constitutional provision making the colonies part of France was never enforced before Bonaparte annulled it in 1799. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against a long tradition in Haitian historiography, Geggus holds that Louverture did not seek independence and that secession was forced on the revolution from outside.

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.

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.