Petion moves that Dessalines command everyone, and the generals agree

Until this point insurgent activity had been a set of parallel wars run by regional leaders. At a council of war the black generals, responding to a motion from the influential Petion, elected Dessalines commander in chief, with Christophe as chief of staff of the newly unified indigenous army. The independent bands, particularly the Congos, refused at first because they had not forgiven Dessalines for persecuting them, and several of their leaders were killed on his orders before the authority stuck. The change was operational rather than symbolic. Concrete planning replaced improvisation, and Dessalines proved able to mass highly mobile infantry rapidly against chosen points. Agricultural workers who had stayed out of the fighting now joined former colonial units. Rochambeau, after inspecting the north, concluded he could only hold Cap-Francais, Mole, Saint Marc, Port-au-Prince, Leogane, Petit Goave, Jacmel, Les Cayes and Jeremie.

Henriette Saint-Marc was known in Port-au-Prince as a quiet and respectable woman who walked with her eyes down past the barracks of the old regiments of Artois, Guyenne and Normandy. When the generals at Arcahaie ran short of powder and shot she began obtaining both from French soldiers, by whatever means were available to her, and she was one of many women doing it. Pamphile de Lacroix, who wrote the history of the Leclerc expedition, confirms that the guerrillas were supplied this way. One evening in December 1802, on the slope of the morne de Desprez, the officer paying court to her turned out to be an agent of the maréchaussée who had been watching her for weeks. He put irons on her wrists and took her to the Artois barracks. A quick court martial sentenced her to hang. She was executed the next day on the square in front of the cathedral. That evening Rochambeau's palace held a ball with illuminations and speeches.

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.

Girard reports that when the rebel columns attacked Jacmel in February 1803 they advanced calling on the army of Moreau. Jean Moreau was a French general identified with republican principle and opposed to Bonaparte, and many of the soldiers who had landed with Leclerc a year earlier had served under him. The cry was therefore a recruiting device aimed across the battle line, telling French troops that the fight was against the reactionary faction in charge of the expedition rather than against France. The same tactic appears in a letter Cange sent a month earlier to the French commander at Leogane, offering him the same rights enjoyed by the black and mixed race population of the colony and closing with cheers for liberty, equality and Moreau. Girard notes that the approach worked, with individual French soldiers and whole companies of Polish and German troops crossing over to the rebel side.