Insurgent barges cross to Tortuga and destroy the best hospital

Both Leclerc and Rochambeau had invested heavily in Tortuga because its climate was healthy and the war had not touched it, and convalescents lived in private lodgings there. The defences were a three-gun battery and an observation post manned by one officer and eight soldiers. Insurgents rowed the channel at night, guided and helped by local black inhabitants, and fell on the hospital compound. About two hundred patients were killed, among them the Polish captains Pagowski and Kaminski. A delaying action by Adjutant Commander Boscus let roughly eight hundred people escape into the woods. Three hundred French troops sent from Le Cap aboard Le Duquesne retook the ground and sank two retreating barges on 21 February. The strategic effect outlasted the raid: Prefect Daure moved every sick and wounded man to Mole St. Nicolas, and the Director of Hospitals reported the collapse in morale to Paris.

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.

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.