The independence act says fine words are what defeated the rebels

The declaration of 1804 is read here as a direct reply to the abstract universalism of the earlier constitution. It argues that liberty, equality and fraternity were not merely insufficient but positively dangerous, stating that the rebels had been beaten less by French armies than by the moving eloquence of French proclamations. Ciccariello-Maher accepts that the text is Manichean, describing the French as a barbarous people who are not and never will be brothers, but insists that the claim is political rather than biological, and that it is qualified as a prediction about behaviour. The declaration defers universal reconciliation without abandoning it, treating separation as the step that allows Haitians to exist by and for themselves. He notes that its author Boisrond-Tonnerre reputedly demanded the skin of a white man for parchment and a bayonet for a pen, and that Dessalines approved.

Arnaud Andre Roberjot Lartigue, a Creole planter who had fled the colony in 1803 and still expected France to retake the whole island, was appointed agent of the Saint-Domingue government at St Thomas. His actual assignment was narrow: French prize cases and the affairs of French citizens arriving on the Danish island. He went well past it. He put to Governor Muhlenfels the question whether a foreign nation had any right to trade with the revolted of Saint-Domingue and answered it himself, arguing that a revolt of Blacks in part of a colony does not interrupt ownership, that the revolt did not repeal the laws barring foreigners from the colony's ports, and that such trade broke France's treaties. He added a warning of self-interest, that what befalls one government today befalls another tomorrow and every slaveholding power should be prohibiting the traffic.

Leclerc, looking for a pretext after the surrender, stationed five hundred soldiers near Louverture's estate at Ennery and waited. Trouble between those troops and local people gave Louverture reason to ask that they be withdrawn, and Leclerc replied that General Brunet would come to discuss it. Instead Leclerc instructed Brunet to invite Louverture to headquarters and arrest him there. Woodward records that Louverture had been warned of the plan and went anyway, at night, to the Georges plantation. While he waited for Brunet to come back into the room, French soldiers seized him and put him aboard the frigate La Creole. He was carried to Le Cap, transferred to the Heros where his family joined him, and sailed for Brest. The whole sequence, Woodward argues, followed the secret instructions Bonaparte had given Leclerc before the fleet left France.

From this year ministers in Philadelphia began preaching sermons on the first of January, a date that marked both the abolition of the American slave trade and the declaration of Haitian independence four years earlier. Jackson sets the practice against the mass arrival of refugees from Saint-Domingue in American ports through the seventeen nineties, which brought firsthand accounts of the rebel victory at Cap-Francais into black communities, and against Gary Nash's finding that American born black Philadelphians came to think of themselves differently because of the revolution, as part of an Atlantic African people contesting white supremacy. He notes the contrast in the same city, where white Philadelphians had gathered near Independence Hall on 4 July 1804 to celebrate a very different anniversary, and where the conservative reading of Haiti also had its adherents.