Dessalines defects from the French army and calls himself a Frenchman

When the colonial officers went over to the rebellion in October 1802, Dessalines wrote to his former French superior Pierre Quantin to explain himself. Girard reads the letter closely because of what it does not contain. Dessalines gives two reasons for changing sides, the recent killings of colonial troops by the French and the growing conviction that Bonaparte meant to restore slavery, and he describes himself as a Frenchman and a friend of his country. Independence is absent. Girard builds his central argument on this and similar documents. The war that ended in a new nation began as a defence of the emancipation law of 1794, waged by men who believed they were the loyal republicans and that the reactionary faction around Rochambeau were the real rebels against the Republic. On this reading the drive to independence was a late arrival rather than the programme from which the fighting started. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard dates the rebels' commitment to independence to mid 1803, not to the October 1802 defection that standard accounts treat as its beginning.

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.

The defection converted a manpower shortage into a rout in progress. Indigenous forces operating in the Northern Department reached fifteen thousand, while Leclerc's effectives had fallen from an army of thirty-four thousand to about three thousand with a further seven thousand sick or convalescent. Polish detachments woke up inside enemy lines. Wodzinski barricaded his men in a church at Acul, then broke out through the encircling force to Fort Jeantot beside Le Cap, losing between one and two hundred killed, wounded and captured. Over the following fortnight the Poles and French repulsed seven assaults on Fort Jeantot, retook Morne Pierre Michel and held off a general attack on the capital on 26 October. A counteroffensive south of Le Cap collapsed when two nominally loyal colonial battalions turned their fire on their own flanks, killing Wodzinski and burning three Polish companies alive in an isolated building.