Three days after Dessalines calls on him, Petion turns on the French

Petion had sailed with the expedition, enlisting alongside other officers who had followed Rigaud, and commanded the artillery battalion in General Debelle's division at the siege of Crete-a-Pierrot. By the autumn the position of officers of colour in the French army had become lethal: some sent aboard warships on supposed missions were never heard of again, others deserted. Quartered at Haut-du-Cap a few kilometres from Leclerc's headquarters, Petion received an unannounced visit from Dessalines, his opponent in the southern civil war two years earlier, and three days later took up arms. Bellegarde says the effect was to accelerate the whole insurrection. As the first commander of the Army of Independence to acknowledge Dessalines's authority, Petion brought over the mulatto officers who had fought beside him in the south, and being trusted by the maroon band leaders, most of whom detested Dessalines, he brought them in too. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

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.

The article prints a certificate signed by Repussard, commander of the national guard at Verrettes, together with his officers and men. It records the capture of insurgents in the heights above the town and their separate interrogations, in which they said they had risen on the secret orders of Charles Belair and were bound to obey him as their chief. The statements describe a plan to concentrate in the Grands Cahos, to kill blacks and men of colour who had gone over to the French, to obtain cartridges from Saint-Marc on the pretext of marching against the rebels, to kill Repussard and his guardsmen, and then to join the rising. The last statements say the moment had to be seized or the whites would restore slavery and kill everyone who had served under Toussaint. The document was sealed and sent directly to Rochambeau.

Pierrot tracks the racial vocabulary the Times of London used for Toussaint and finds it moving with events. For years the paper used black, negro and mulatto more or less at random, but after the Leclerc expedition sailed the descriptions hardened. An article of 1 October 1803 implied that Toussaint could neither read nor write and had been selected by white people as a fit instrument for their escape from persecution, while presenting Dessalines, mistakenly, as a freeborn mulatto of brutal disposition. The mechanism is a transfer of agency. As an active general Toussaint might be granted some white blood, and once defeated and imprisoned he became wholly black and wholly dependent on white direction, at which point the new leader of the revolution acquired the mixed ancestry that had been withdrawn from his predecessor.