A rebel captain sinks his barge rather than lose its colours

During a naval engagement off Arcahaie in May 1803 a rebel barge went down with its commander, a mixed race captain named Laporte, who chose to scuttle the vessel and die rather than hand over its flag. The episode is known from a report the French admiral Latouche Treville sent to the naval minister Decres on 20 May 1803, which also records the motto carried on the banner, a phrase equivalent to free or die. Girard stresses two things about the report. It is the near contemporary document at the centre of the whole flag controversy, and it describes the colours as black and red. That detail matters because the later national narrative needed them to be blue and red. Latouche's report also preserves testimony from a black sailor named Jean-Pierre about disagreements among the rebel leaders over how far the war should go.

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.

General Jean-Louis Ferrand, who had taken command at Santo Domingo in late 1803 after refusing a place on a British ship out, could not defeat the new state militarily but could make its trade dangerous. French privateers, supported by Spanish corsairs under the Franco-Spanish alliance, patrolled the waters around Hispaniola and seized merchants suspected of dealing with the people they called brigands, taking more than a hundred American vessels in two years. Because Ferrand's own position was precarious, prizes were processed in Spanish ports. Ferrer's finding, which Gaffield uses, is that property was often condemned without trial and the ships and their human and other cargo sold, with duties owed to the crown divided among Cuban officials instead. Haiti answered by declaring war on Spain and seizing Spanish vessels for condemnation in Haitian ports. Cuban authorities, meanwhile, preferred to behave as though Haiti did not exist.

On 6 January 1805 General Jean Louis Ferrand, commanding the French remnant in Santo Domingo, issued an order sanctioning the seizure and enslavement of Haitians. Haiti had declared independence one year earlier. Jean Jacques Dessalines answered in February with an expedition of twenty thousand men against Santo Domingo city, which failed when a French naval squadron under Admiral Missiessy arrived at the right moment and the British declined to help him. In an address to his citizens on 12 April 1805 Dessalines named Ferrand's decree as a reason for the invasion, accused the Spanish side of assisting French designs, and told Haitians to live or die as free people. He had copies of the January order distributed so that people could read it themselves. Emilio Cordero Michel later argued that the decree was indeed the main cause of the campaign, since it showed that Ferrand intended to retake Haiti and restore slavery there as he had in the east.