Leclerc tells Bonaparte that Dessalines does his hateful work

The article tracks Leclerc's opinion of Dessalines through his own correspondence and finds it turning within six weeks. On 25 August he told the minister of marine that Dessalines and Christophe were serving well and that he owed them real obligations. On this date he wrote to the first consul describing Dessalines as the man through whom he had every odious measure carried out, the butcher of his own people. By 26 September he was reporting to the same correspondent that Dessalines, who until then had not thought of rising, was now thinking of it, and claiming to hold his secret. On 7 October he told the minister of marine that he had ordered the arrest of Maurepas and Dessalines. De Young argues that the shift follows the arrival at headquarters of reports from officers in the Artibonite other than 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.