Pétion summoned Daut and the battalion commanders Moreau and Jean-Louis François at night and raised the standard of independence at Haut-du-Cap.

Brigade commander Pétion, quartered at Haut-du-Cap, on that very Breda plantation where the First of the Blacks had seen the light, observed the march of events with the habitual impassiveness of his character. But, seeing death decimate his companions every day, threatened perhaps himself, he suddenly takes the resolve of raising the standard of independence. In the night of 21 vendémiaire (13 October), he had summoned brigade commander Jean-Philippe Daut, who was quartered, with the 10th, on the Vaudreuil plantation (1), not far from Breda. He wished him to be accompanied only by Captain Benjamin Noël, whose great reserve and brilliant bravery he had been in a position to appreciate. On the arrival of these two officers, battalion commanders Moreau and Jean-Louis François, the one of the 1st, the other of the 2nd battalion of the 13th, were sent for (2).

Pétion communicates his plan to them. “Victors,” he says in concluding, “the whole world will applaud our successes; vanquished, we shall set between our oppressors and ourselves the barrier of death (3).”

The officers applaud the heroic resolution of Pétion, and swear to second him. The movement was concerted, the execution fixed for that same night. Pétion is urged to warn Clervaux of it, who, serving in the lines of Haut-du-Cap, lodged there. “No,” says Pétion; “there will be time enough to warn him when we have taken up arms. Besides, do we not need the greatest prudence, the greatest circumspection, the greatest dissimulation, the greatest mistrust of everything that surrounds us, if we do not wish to run the chance of paying with our heads for the course we embrace (1)?”