Vertieres ends the expedition sent to restore slavery

Daut records the close of the battle as the effective termination of the expedition Bonaparte had sent to bring slavery back. General Francois Capoix commanded, aided by General Vernet, who was connected to Louverture by marriage, and the army she calls Indigenous forced the French to capitulate. Rochambeau surrendered and on 4 December the bulk of the French troops sailed away exhausted and humiliated. Dessalines, Christophe and Augustin Clervaux then declared the island independent of France. Daut adds a second argument about memory. Vertieres was of the same order of importance as Austerlitz or Yorktown, yet for years no monument marked it, and the Gazette royale complained that the bones of those who died at Crete-a-Pierrot, la Tannerie, Haut-du-Cap, the Cul-de-Sac plain and the mountains of Petit-Goave and Tiburon had whitened into dust unremembered. Christophe's Citadelle was built partly to answer that absence.

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.

The women who had carried the French army through the yellow fever season were killed by it afterwards. They were hanged, bayoneted, burned alive and thrown to fighting dogs. Some of the officers decided that physical suffering was not enough and added a refinement. Women were invited to balls, and in the middle of the evening the music would break off into a funeral march while the coffins of their husbands, brothers and sons were carried in and displayed to them. To diminish what the nursing had proved, it was then put about that black people enjoyed a natural and absolute immunity to the disease. Leclerc's printed thanks stayed on the record all the same, and Haitian women were still producing that page of the official gazette a century and a half later. The claim of immunity arrived after the fact and covered nobody who had died nursing.

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.