Haiti's Flag Day commemorates a scene that probably never happened

The familiar account has Dessalines slashing the white band out of the French tricolor with his saber at a conference of rebel commanders at Arcahaie, and Catherine Flon stitching the two remaining bands together. Girard opens by stating that the archives support almost none of this. The scene does not appear in the nineteenth century histories of Madiou and Ardouin, who built their narratives from interviews with surviving veterans of the war, and Girard concludes that both the day now kept as the national holiday and the town named as its setting are most likely wrong. The mechanism he identifies is retrospective nation building. A young state needed a founding tableau, and later writers supplied one, adding characters and gestures that no contemporary document mentions. He compares the process to the folklore that accumulated around the Bois Caiman ceremony of August 1791, another episode where commemoration outgrew evidence. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against the national commemoration, Girard holds that both the 18 May date and the Arcahaie setting are almost certainly inaccurate.

Maurepas was one of Toussaint Louverture's officers and commanded the department of the Northwest. In 1802 his wife shared his end. In the channel between Tortuga and the mainland the whole family was hoisted and hung from the great yards of a ship and flogged until they died, and the bodies were then thrown into the sea. The account records that Madame Maurepas spent the time urging her husband and her children to die like heroes rather than complaining. The same pages list Madame Chevalier, who put the noose around her own neck on the deck of the Duquesne, Madame Paul Louverture, taken by night with her children and drowned in the roadstead of Cap, and Louise Rateau, who kept a house in Port-au-Prince where men plotting against Rochambeau could meet. General Leclerc wrote to Napoleon that it had to be seen with what spirit both men and women went to meet death.

Geggus argues that the blacksmith Gabriel's conspiracy in Richmond, Virginia looks very much like a response to the abolitionism of the French Republic rather than to the Haitian Revolution. At that moment an undeclared war ran between France and the United States, and Frenchmen living locally were said to have had a hand in it. Historians routinely link the conspiracy to Saint-Domingue, but contemporary sources show no trace of the conspirators discussing it, and the evidence of the black revolution's impact on Virginian slaves is in his judgement remarkably slight. He makes the same move about the attempt launched from Saint-Domingue in 1799 to raise a slave insurrection in Jamaica: the initiative came from Paris and was organised by the French official Philippe Roume, while Toussaint Louverture secretly revealed the plan to the British because a maritime blockade would have ruined him. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus denies the standard link between Gabriel's conspiracy and the Haitian Revolution, finding no contemporary evidence for it.

In January 1810, with the last ships from Cuba still arriving, Governor William Claiborne set down his view of the population he now governed. He confessed apprehension that disorder might break out in a place so mixed and growing more mixed every day. He put the number of free men of colour in and around New Orleans capable of bearing arms at not less than eight hundred, counting those recently landed from Cuba. He allowed that their conduct so far had been correct. He then added that in a country with so large a black population they should be carefully watched. He had already asked the American consul at Santiago de Cuba to steer the remaining French elsewhere, and in November he made the same request of the American agent in Jamaica, saying that Louisiana already had a greater proportion of that kind of population than suited its interests. A rising of enslaved people broke out upriver the following year.