British envoys spend four days at Gonaives with a rebel general

By July Dessalines had learned that war between France and Britain had resumed, which sharply improved the odds of a rebel victory, and statements supporting outright independence begin to appear in letters his subordinates sent to Jamaican and Cuban authorities that summer and autumn. In early August the three main factions in the colony, the French army, the white planters and the rebels, all applied to the British governor of Jamaica for assistance, and he promptly refused the French. Two British envoys then met Dessalines at Gonaives and filed a long report praising his diplomatic and political skill while noting his continued difficulties with the rank and file. In September he wrote directly to the British government in London, hoping to bypass the envoys and to negotiate state to state rather than colony to colony.

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.

On 9 February 1804 a vessel called the Good Hope wrecked near Higuey, on the eastern coast of Santo Domingo. She carried captives for sale, had a mostly British crew and a British captain, and sailed under the Danish flag, having touched at Saint Croix and Havana before making for Santo Domingo. On 18 March the board that General Jean Louis Ferrand used to judge captured ships ruled that everything aboard was forfeit, including the 185 people listed as cargo, and ordered them sold. The sale raised 81,400 francs. Ferrand's government was short of money and leaned on ship seizures to pay its soldiers and its clerks, justifying many of them as punishment for trading with Haiti. Two years later 187 people from the same wreck were resold in Santo Domingo city by a merchant from Saint Thomas. Whatever their legal status had been before the wreck, paperwork now recorded them as property.

From this year ministers in Philadelphia began preaching sermons on the first of January, a date that marked both the abolition of the American slave trade and the declaration of Haitian independence four years earlier. Jackson sets the practice against the mass arrival of refugees from Saint-Domingue in American ports through the seventeen nineties, which brought firsthand accounts of the rebel victory at Cap-Francais into black communities, and against Gary Nash's finding that American born black Philadelphians came to think of themselves differently because of the revolution, as part of an Atlantic African people contesting white supremacy. He notes the contrast in the same city, where white Philadelphians had gathered near Independence Hall on 4 July 1804 to celebrate a very different anniversary, and where the conservative reading of Haiti also had its adherents.