Dessalines published, and had posted in the streets of the Cap, an act promising safety and protection to the settlers who remained in the colony.

In place of those interesting victims, your dismayed eye perceives only their murderers, only the tigers still dripping with their blood, whose dreadful presence reproaches you with your insensibility and your guilty slowness in avenging them. Political passions here cruelly distort the facts: in January 1804 none of the artisans of our woes defiled the Haitian soil with his presence; all had fled the catastrophes and had embarked with the French army. What remained in the colony, in the way of whites? Some merchants who had concerned themselves little or not at all with politics, some hundreds of soldiers sick in our hospitals, to whom had been promised all the care that their painful condition required, some old families who had been loath to abandon the place of their birth, their habits, their associations, their affections (things ever sacred) in order to go and endure misery in the neighboring islands. There remained, in short, only the settlers, to whom Dessalines himself had promised safety and protection by the act of 27 brumaire, Year XII (19 November 1803), published and posted at his request in the streets of the Cap. Boisrond calls down the thunderbolt on those unfortunates!