Two strips of cloth joined at Arcahaie become a country's flag

At the congress held at Arcahaie in May 1803 the insurgent leaders needed a flag to fight under. The account most often told holds that the French tricolour was read by the mass of black soldiers as standing for the union of the colony's three groups, white, mixed and black, and that Dessalines tore the white out of it with a quick gesture. Catherine Flon then joined the blue and red bands and sewed them together, using her own hair for thread. A second version has a daughter of Dessalines beaten by a colonist on whose plantation she had stayed on as a servant in order to report what happened there. Seeing her bloodied, Dessalines is said to have torn her blue skirt, taken his red kerchief, and asked Catherine Flon to join them, swearing that no Frenchman would strike their daughters again. The argument offered for this version is that the blue of the Haitian flag differs from the French blue.

Dessalines's second in command, the mixed race officer Nicolas Geffrard, opened his own channel to the Spanish governor of Santiago de Cuba. The letter is notable for its polished style and its learned references to Roman antiquity, describing Rochambeau as a genius more inventive than Nero, Caligula and Heliogabalus. Its diplomacy was practical. It stressed common ground between the two islands by recalling that mixed race exiles from the revolution had found peaceful refuge in Cuba a few years earlier, and it promised not to carry the slave revolt to Cuban shores, a shrewd concession given how much Spanish policy turned on security fears. Girard reads the use of lighter skinned officers as intermediaries as a deliberate accommodation of the racial prejudices of the men being addressed, and as a continuation of Louverture's diplomatic methods.

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.

Haitian historians have often argued that Louverture aimed all along at an independent state. Geggus reports that most scholars disagree and sets out the reasoning. He already had independence in fact, and a formal break would have brought a French attack and probably a naval blockade by the slaveholding British and Americans as well. In a hostile world, as long as the French Republic stood against slavery and racial discrimination, people of colour in its colonies were better off remaining colonial subjects. On this reading independence was adopted in the Haitian Revolution as a last resort and only to protect what the revolution had already won. It was Bonaparte's aggression that precipitated the separation. Geggus also notes that the citizenship promised in 1794 proved illusory, since the constitutional provision making the colonies part of France was never enforced before Bonaparte annulled it in 1799. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against a long tradition in Haitian historiography, Geggus holds that Louverture did not seek independence and that secession was forced on the revolution from outside.