Rochambeau throws funeral balls and imports man-hunting dogs

By May 1803 Rochambeau knew that Britain was at war with France again and that no more reinforcements would arrive. Yellow fever had already killed most of the expedition, more than fifty thousand men in eighteen months with nine in ten dying of disease rather than combat, and Leclerc himself had died of it in November 1802. Girard describes the mixture of despair and cruelty that followed. The command concluded that only killing the entire adult black population and importing fresh slaves could hold the colony, since ten years of revolution had taught people to value freedom and to fight. At Port-au-Prince Rochambeau entertained elite women of colour at a ball hung with funeral drapery and then led them to a room where their husbands' bodies lay. At Cap Francais he built an arena in a former monastery, tied a man to a post and set dogs shipped from Cuba on him.

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.

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.