The battle that ends the war waits ninety years to be remembered

The most striking claim in the delivered pages concerns the gap between an event and its status. Le Glaunec states plainly that before the 1890s the battle of 18 November 1803 was not part of national memory. It became a recognised moment of history from the 1920s onward, and only in the 1950s, through the celebrations of the country's one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of independence, did it reach the position it now holds. Shortly afterwards it became the emblem of Duvalierist power and of an alliance between living soldiers and the ancestors of the war of independence, a bond the author says persists today, three decades after the fall of the Duvaliers in 1986. The mechanism he describes is commemorative rather than military. A battle acquires its meaning from the uses later regimes find for it, not from what happened on the day. Where this account departs from the standard one: Le Glaunec dates the entry of Vertieres into Haitian national memory to the 1890s and later, denying it any continuous commemorative tradition from 1803.

Commodore Cumberland stationed the frigate Pique off the harbour, put brigs in the channel to Isle a Vache and told his indigenous allies to bring up small craft. Hunger did the rest. The garrison ate diseased mules, the dead were carted into the sea nightly, and men foraging at the O'Shiell farm died eating poisonous plants. Brunet's council of war rejected evacuation to Cartagena as suicide and negotiated. Cumberland conceded military honours but insisted the whole garrison become prisoners of war, seized every vessel in port as spoil, and blocked the civilian exodus he had promised to assist. Twenty-five Polish officers and 231 other ranks went into captivity, their pay certified by Malachowski's administrative bureau on the way out. The British handed the town to the insurgents within a day or two, and Dessalines, learning of its fall, turned north toward Le Cap. Where this account departs from the standard one: The work weighs the Polish memoirists against Madiou and concludes that Lux and Wierzbicki embellished the massacre they reported at Les Cayes, since Madiou records that persons and property were respected when the southern army entered.

Dessalines's second in command, the mixed race officer Nicolas Geffrard, opened his own channel to the Spanish governor of Santiago de Cuba. The letter is notable for its polished style and its learned references to Roman antiquity, describing Rochambeau as a genius more inventive than Nero, Caligula and Heliogabalus. Its diplomacy was practical. It stressed common ground between the two islands by recalling that mixed race exiles from the revolution had found peaceful refuge in Cuba a few years earlier, and it promised not to carry the slave revolt to Cuban shores, a shrewd concession given how much Spanish policy turned on security fears. Girard reads the use of lighter skinned officers as intermediaries as a deliberate accommodation of the racial prejudices of the men being addressed, and as a continuation of Louverture's diplomatic methods.

By early 1804 Davenport had sold the figures to new proprietors who set up in New York. The collection grew to seventy or eighty pieces, many carried over from the previous year, but Louverture is absent from the list and near his old position there is now a scene from Othello. White concludes that the figure was converted. The alteration is legible because wax artists had no aversion to gore, staging the execution of Louis the sixteenth with spouting fake blood, the killing of Marat, and a general dying under tomahawks. Louverture had been shown without any violent scene because he was attached to no single atrocity, unlike Dessalines. Her reading is that a hyperrealistic likeness of a black man governing was harder to display in a slaveholding society than a licensed Shakespearean murder, and that the change came in the very year independence was declared. Where this account departs from the standard one: White locates the silencing of the revolution in objects as well as texts, arguing visual culture was even more restrictive than the written record.