A prize court sells 185 shipwrecked captives for 81,400 francs

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.

At the congress held at Arcahaie in May 1803 the insurgent leaders needed a flag to fight under. The account most often told holds that the French tricolour was read by the mass of black soldiers as standing for the union of the colony's three groups, white, mixed and black, and that Dessalines tore the white out of it with a quick gesture. Catherine Flon then joined the blue and red bands and sewed them together, using her own hair for thread. A second version has a daughter of Dessalines beaten by a colonist on whose plantation she had stayed on as a servant in order to report what happened there. Seeing her bloodied, Dessalines is said to have torn her blue skirt, taken his red kerchief, and asked Catherine Flon to join them, swearing that no Frenchman would strike their daughters again. The argument offered for this version is that the blue of the Haitian flag differs from the French blue.

Sanite Belair of Verrettes married Charles Belair, an aide de camp of Toussaint Louverture and his nephew, who was made a brigadier general and given command of Arcahaie. In August 1802 the couple raised the Seventh colonial demi-brigade and most of the population of Verrettes and took to the hills of the Cahos, after the disarmings, drownings, hangings and the killing of the wives of several officers of that same demi-brigade. She was captured at Corail-Mirault. Her husband, who was not far away, surrendered so as to share her captivity. Leclerc received Dessalines's letter announcing the arrest on 12 September 1802 and appointed a commission that met six hours after the prisoners reached Cap. On 5 October 1802 that commission, four white officers and Clervaux, considered his rank and her sex and sentenced him to be shot and her to be beheaded. She fought the executioner, refused to kneel, and was shot in the end.

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.