Petion and Clervaux cross to the insurgency with 2,500 colonial troops

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.

The women who had carried the French army through the yellow fever season were killed by it afterwards. They were hanged, bayoneted, burned alive and thrown to fighting dogs. Some of the officers decided that physical suffering was not enough and added a refinement. Women were invited to balls, and in the middle of the evening the music would break off into a funeral march while the coffins of their husbands, brothers and sons were carried in and displayed to them. To diminish what the nursing had proved, it was then put about that black people enjoyed a natural and absolute immunity to the disease. Leclerc's printed thanks stayed on the record all the same, and Haitian women were still producing that page of the official gazette a century and a half later. The claim of immunity arrived after the fact and covered nobody who had died nursing.

On 10 October 1802 General Francois Kerverseau, Napoleon's senior representative in Santo Domingo, published a proclamation to kill a story going round the colony. Several black and mixed race children had been put ashore from a French vessel named Le Berceau, and people were saying they had been sold as slaves with his blessing. Kerverseau insisted no sale had been authorised and promised that any official who approved one would be removed at once. He asked the town to distrust the people spreading the story and to trust instead those who watched over them while they slept. The timing explains the urgency. Napoleon's expedition had reached the island at the start of that year, and by autumn word was travelling that its real purpose was to put slavery back. France had already restored slavery in Guadeloupe. Anyone freed by the French emancipation law of 1794 had reason to read the arrival of Le Berceau as a warning.

By early 1804 Davenport had sold the figures to new proprietors who set up in New York. The collection grew to seventy or eighty pieces, many carried over from the previous year, but Louverture is absent from the list and near his old position there is now a scene from Othello. White concludes that the figure was converted. The alteration is legible because wax artists had no aversion to gore, staging the execution of Louis the sixteenth with spouting fake blood, the killing of Marat, and a general dying under tomahawks. Louverture had been shown without any violent scene because he was attached to no single atrocity, unlike Dessalines. Her reading is that a hyperrealistic likeness of a black man governing was harder to display in a slaveholding society than a licensed Shakespearean murder, and that the change came in the very year independence was declared. Where this account departs from the standard one: White locates the silencing of the revolution in objects as well as texts, arguing visual culture was even more restrictive than the written record.