A false report of Toussaint's death arrives after it has come true

White tracks the news of Louverture's captivity and death through the American press. Papers covered the Leclerc campaign and its motives in 1802, then the arrest, then his letters to Bonaparte from a cold cell in a remote prison near the Swiss border. In January 1803 reports out of London stated that he had died. The claim was premature when written, but by the time it had crossed the Atlantic and been reprinted it had become accurate, since Louverture died in April 1803. The sequence matters for her argument about the waxworks, because the figure went on show exactly when its subject was the best known person of the revolution and was being deliberately erased. Leclerc had been sent with a large fleet and a secret instruction to restore slavery, and he had removed the governor to France to make that possible.

The offer of the supreme command to Dessalines is dated by de Young from the oral testimony of Madame Dessalines to this day, six weeks after the execution of Belair and while the published trial record was still circulating. The article treats this as the fact that breaks the traditional story. Experienced commanders including Clervaux, Petion and Christophe would not plausibly have submitted to a man who had just handed Belair to the French, and the thousand or so sub chiefs of the guerrilla bands, who had been hunted by Dessalines and were bound to the dead man by personal loyalty, would have found the arrangement impossible. Haitians of the period were well informed about the private conduct of prominent men through the network of rumour, so the article assumes they knew what French intelligence knew, that Dessalines had learned of the denunciation only after the fact. Where this account departs from the standard one: Ardouin, Madiou, Saint-Remy and Stoddard treat the offer as evidence of Dessalines's ruthlessness; de Young argues the offer is only intelligible if the betrayal never happened.

Governor Nugent sent Corbet, who had negotiated with black leaders for a decade, to Haiti aboard the Tartare in early January. His report to Kingston states that he is laying before the governor a declaration of independence he says was composed while he was there, or shortly before his arrival at Port-au-Prince, and which he could not present earlier. The article treats this as decisive against the received chronology. It does not settle which part of the Acte Corbet carried, but it contradicts the claim that the full text was drafted overnight on New Year's Eve and published throughout Haiti on 1 January, while confirming that something was in print by the second half of January. The article connects a Charleston news item of 23 February about a proclamation received at Kingston to the same report. Where this account departs from the standard one: Directly contradicts Madiou's account of a single night of composition by Boisrond-Tonnerre followed by nationwide proclamation on 1 January 1804.

Girard tracks the appearance of independence as a stated objective through the rebels' foreign correspondence. In August 1803 Dessalines sent Captain Dufour to the British governor of Jamaica, and in that conversation Dufour named independence as the goal. A letter carried the following month by Geffrard to a Spanish official in Cuba made a similar statement, framing independence as the alternative to a French administration that had offered drownings and shootings in place of the loyalty the population had shown. Girard connects the shift to the resumption of the war between France and Britain, which made French defeat plausible, and to Rochambeau's methods, which destroyed any remaining case for staying French. Dessalines also approached the British government about the colony's political existence. The sequence supports his claim that the aim of a separate state crystallised in the last months of the war rather than at its outset.