Faubert and Desruisseaux attacked Petit-Goâve at seven in the morning and took it, and Laplume escaped by pirogue to Grand-Goâve.

Meanwhile the position at Petit-Goâve was critical. On 27 prairial (15 June) Toussaint sent there three hundred men of the 2nd battalion of the 8th, under the orders of Battalion Chief Maçon, and a hundred men of the national guard of Léogane, to reinforce the 11th, which Nérette commanded. Laplume went there as well, having in his escort Captain Segrettier, of whom he was fond and whom he had obtained from Pétion as his companion. He had the national guards occupy the plantations Vialet and Cuperlier, to the south of the town; Fort Mendis was held by Nérette with a part of his demi-brigade, and the fort at the seaside by the other part of that brigade. The battalion of the 8th remained on the Place d’armes as a reserve (1). It was then that Commander Delva betook himself to the Pont-de-Miragoâne and persuaded Faubert and Desruisseaux to take the initiative in the struggle (2). Now these two officers, without direct orders from Rigaud, who was at Aquin, advanced in the night; and on the following day, the 28th, at seven in the morning, having skirted the advance posts, they fell upon Petit-Goâve with the 2nd and 3rd demi-brigades of the South.

Nérette defended himself valiantly, and even retook Fort Mendis. Maçon, with his battalion, made no movement. Ready, on the contrary, to surrender, he asked to see the chiefs of the army of the South. But Faubert, with his usual brusqueness, ordered fire to be opened on him: the 8th broke up and most of the soldiers joined the assailants. Maçon made the mistake of not imitating them, for he was to pay dearly for his indecision. The fort at the seaside, where Captain Laucoste commanded, is also attacked: under a hail of grapeshot and bullets, Captain Malton and Lieutenant Léger penetrate it. Laplume goes in person to this important point. Malton declares him a prisoner; but at that very instant a young *mulâtre*, by the name of Édouard Boudot, with a musket shot kills Malton, crying: Long live General Laplume (1)!

Léger did not on that account let the prisoner escape; but he spoke to him with a consideration that later saved his life. Shut up in one of the rooms of the fort, Laplume, for whose guard Léger had gone to fetch a detachment, escaped by a back door, descended into the ditches, reached the shore, threw himself into a pirogue with an artillery officer and a gendarme, and then, by dint of rowing, made his way to Grand-Goâve, where Brigade Chief Ulysse, who commanded the district of Petit-Goâve, had already rallied the troops (2). The victors were inexorable toward the whites; irritated by the memory of the barbarous joy that this caste had shown at the famous *mercuriale* of Toussaint, they put more than seventeen of them to the sword. These executions produced the fatal effect of increasing against the {{men of 4 April|*citoyens du 4 avril*: the free men of color made citizens by the law of 4 April 1792}} the hatred of the émigrés; and so, in the course of this war, they were seen to display more rage than Toussaint himself.