On Petion's proposal the flag loses its white band at Arcahaie

Dessalines had assigned Petion to organise the campaign in the west, and Petion convoked an assembly of the officers operating there, which met at Arcahaie under Dessalines's presidency to consolidate his authority and coordinate the final push for independence. Bellegarde attributes the creation of the two-colour flag to Petion's recommendation at that meeting, with Dessalines performing the act: removing from the French tricolour the white band that stood in the insurgents' eyes for the white colonists, and joining the blue and the red as the emblem of union between Blacks and men of colour. Bellegarde's emphasis is on that union rather than on the gesture. His entire argument is that Haitian independence became possible when the two groups that colonial law had kept apart, and that had fought each other in 1800, agreed to act as one, and he makes Petion the agent of that reconciliation. Corroborated by 3 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Bellegarde credits the design of the Haitian flag to Petion's recommendation rather than to Dessalines alone.

The article prints a certificate signed by Repussard, commander of the national guard at Verrettes, together with his officers and men. It records the capture of insurgents in the heights above the town and their separate interrogations, in which they said they had risen on the secret orders of Charles Belair and were bound to obey him as their chief. The statements describe a plan to concentrate in the Grands Cahos, to kill blacks and men of colour who had gone over to the French, to obtain cartridges from Saint-Marc on the pretext of marching against the rebels, to kill Repussard and his guardsmen, and then to join the rising. The last statements say the moment had to be seized or the whites would restore slavery and kill everyone who had served under Toussaint. The document was sealed and sent directly to Rochambeau.

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.

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.