Belair surrenders when a search party finds his wife in the grass

The third document the article prints is Repussard's report of the capture. Ordered by General Jablonowski to place himself under Dessalines at Petite Riviere, he divided his guardsmen into two columns and marched into the Cahos, taking the left column himself. Near Corail Mauger he surprised Belair's brother in law hidden in a ravine, questioned him without result, then searched the woods and found Madame Belair concealed by a clump of tall grass. Setting off with her towards the post where Belair was said to be entrenched, he found that Belair, seeing his wife taken, rode out and surrendered. Repussard delivered the couple to Dessalines a league away. He also complained of a strict order not to open fire, which de Young reads as evidence either that Dessalines wanted to leave Belair an escape or that the prisoner was wanted alive for questioning. Where this account departs from the standard one: Classical historians have Dessalines hunting Belair down and betraying him; this report shows the capture made by an outside national guard unit sent on Jablonowski's orders, after a denunciation written three weeks earlier by an officer who was not Dessalines.

At the congress held at Arcahaie in May 1803 the insurgent leaders needed a flag to fight under. The account most often told holds that the French tricolour was read by the mass of black soldiers as standing for the union of the colony's three groups, white, mixed and black, and that Dessalines tore the white out of it with a quick gesture. Catherine Flon then joined the blue and red bands and sewed them together, using her own hair for thread. A second version has a daughter of Dessalines beaten by a colonist on whose plantation she had stayed on as a servant in order to report what happened there. Seeing her bloodied, Dessalines is said to have torn her blue skirt, taken his red kerchief, and asked Catherine Flon to join them, swearing that no Frenchman would strike their daughters again. The argument offered for this version is that the blue of the Haitian flag differs from the French blue.

Slavery had never been abolished in Martinique, because a British occupation kept the French emancipation law of 1794 from ever taking effect there. When Britain returned the island under the peace of Amiens in September 1802, France recovered a colony where the old system was still running and where British ships had kept the traffic from Africa going right through the war. French traders resumed at once. The first two French slaving vessels arrived in October, a month after the handover. By April 1803 French and British ships together had landed two thousand nine hundred people there. The contrast with Saint-Domingue is the point. In the larger colony the black population was armed and numerous, and French commanders kept postponing any public restoration of slavery. In Martinique nothing had to be restored. The traffic picked up where the war had interrupted it, under a French flag instead of a British one.

On 2 February 1803 the Morning Post in London published Wordsworth's sonnet to Toussaint Louverture. Pierrot concedes that it has been read as an early example of British sympathy for the Haitian cause and argues that it carries the same ambivalence found across the period's writing. The sympathy arrives at the moment its object is languishing in a cell at the Fort de Joux, entirely without power. The poem urges the soldier to keep a cheerful brow in bondage and to take comfort in the thought that nature rather than humankind will remember him, and it replaces his troops and his actual friends with abstract emotions and natural elements. The mechanism is a sublime turn away from political nation toward self and race, which designates Toussaint a literary figure and strips him of any connection to a people.