Miragoâne. Dessalines enters the town.

A few days later Dessalines, taking advantage of a dark night, left two demi-brigades before the bridge, all of whose fires were lit to deceive the enemy, and with the whole remainder of his army entered the department of the South, passing by the position the 9th occupied. At daybreak on 17 May 1800 Pétion perceived that he had been turned and that he might be assailed from the rear by the whole enemy army. After spiking his guns he abandoned the bridge, which Clervaux seized immediately after his departure. Rigaud, for his part, so as not to be enveloped on every side by the strong columns deploying around him, broke up his headquarters and cut his way through the enemy to reach the little savanna of Miragoâne. There he resolved to await the enemy. Dessalines advanced all his masses against him, and they met a stubborn resistance for five hours. Toward the end of the day, succumbing to the great superiority of numbers, Rigaud was compelled to retreat and to enter Miragoâne, which he abandoned the same day. Colonel Faubert, who occupied that town, spiked all its pieces of artillery and gave it to the flames as he withdrew. Most of the cultivators of that district, weary of this devastating war, did not follow the army of the South.

On 17 May Dessalines entered Miragoâne while his light troops spread the alarm as far as Saint-Michel. In one of the houses that had not been burned he came upon a young girl of color laid out on her deathbed. She had been abandoned by her family at the moment the army entered the town. He stopped in the house with a certain solemnity, and was indignant with the mother of this young person, who had not dared to brave death to give her daughter burial. He had the body buried with ceremony.