The mayor of New York refuses to let a French frigate unload

The rest of the Guadeloupe flotilla carried on north and reached New York in August 1802 with twelve hundred and eighty four prisoners spread across its ships. The French naval officers described their errand in official language. The mayor of the city was not persuaded, wrote about the great number of black men held aboard the frigate Consolante, and refused permission to land. What happened next was never recorded in one place. Some of the captives died of dysentery in the harbour. Some got ashore and vanished. Some were sold in the United States in defiance of the law. The Consolante had arrived with three hundred people aboard and sailed for Guadeloupe with one hundred and eighty. Four other ships went on to Brest and delivered eight hundred prisoners nobody had managed to sell. Asked why so many names were missing from the rolls, the officers told the minister of the navy that many had died during the crossing.

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.

Johnson catalogues factual errors in published textbooks and corrects them directly. One survey claimed that Bonaparte attempted to reinstitute slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1800, and she points out that the expedition he sent did not land until 1802 and lost to the revolutionaries in 1803. Alongside this she corrects a claim that the colony held nearly one million enslaved people, saying the number was closer to five hundred thousand at the start of the revolution. She also objects to describing Boukman Dutty as a poet delivering a call to revolution in a Haitian French patois, arguing he should be identified as a Vodou priest who most likely spoke Haitian Creole, and to using the word mulatto for the whole category of free people of colour, which she says misrepresents current scholarship. Where this account departs from the standard one: Johnson explicitly corrects published world history textbooks that date Bonaparte's move against emancipation to 1800 and that inflate the enslaved population to a million.

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.