The Times decides the captured Toussaint was a tool of white men

Pierrot tracks the racial vocabulary the Times of London used for Toussaint and finds it moving with events. For years the paper used black, negro and mulatto more or less at random, but after the Leclerc expedition sailed the descriptions hardened. An article of 1 October 1803 implied that Toussaint could neither read nor write and had been selected by white people as a fit instrument for their escape from persecution, while presenting Dessalines, mistakenly, as a freeborn mulatto of brutal disposition. The mechanism is a transfer of agency. As an active general Toussaint might be granted some white blood, and once defeated and imprisoned he became wholly black and wholly dependent on white direction, at which point the new leader of the revolution acquired the mixed ancestry that had been withdrawn from his predecessor.

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.

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.

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.