Wood credits Clervaux with starting the final insurrection

Wood departs from the usual account by naming Clervaux as the man who initiated the insurrection. On 10 October 1802 he deserted, taking the troops under his command with him, and two days later attacked Cap Francais. The attack was repulsed, but Wood argues the action was sufficient to set the final revolutionary attempt in motion, and within a few days Christophe, Petion and Dessalines had joined the insurgent forces. The mechanism she describes is a cascade of defections rather than a coordinated plan, triggered by the certainty that slavery was to be restored. Most narratives make Dessalines and Petion the movers of October 1802 and treat Clervaux as one of several commanders who followed, so Wood's ordering gives an unusual prominence to a figure who is generally a supporting character. Where this account departs from the standard one: Wood makes Clervaux's desertion on 10 October 1802 the trigger of the final insurrection, where most accounts centre the initiative on Dessalines and Petion.

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.

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.