[6] Haitian historian Jean Price-Mars wrote that the troops killed the inhabitants of the targeted settlements irrespective of race.

[7] The raids, carried out by the Haitian invasion force, were headed by Henri Christophe and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who were present during the actions.

[1][2] After gaining support from the Spaniard population for their rule on the island, the French forces under General François Marie Kerverseau and Jean-Luis Ferrand quickly moved to reinstate slavery, crushing the resistance of freedmen in the vicinity of the Nigua River.

[1][2] Seeking to consolidate the tenuous French position in the east, Ferrand executed a coup against the command of Kerverseau, combining their depleted forces and instituting a flurry of administrative changes.

[9] In 1804, boarder hostilities broke out, with the Haitians taking advantage of Ferrand's earlier evacuation of Santiago, La Vega and Cotuí to capture these towns, installing a mixed-race freedman of Santo Domingo named José Campos Tabares to lead them.

Writings originating in despair and weakness have been circulated, and immediately many amongst you, seduced by perfidious insinuations, solicited the friendship and protection of the French.

Receive here the sacred promise which I make not do anything against your personal safety or your interests, if you seize upon this occasion to shew yourselves worthy of being admitted among the children of Haiti.

[10] People would gradually return starting in July of that year, governed now by one José Serapio Reinoso del Orbe, to form military organizations to resist a future Haitian attack.

[2] Ferrand would, in January 1805, declare the reinitiating of hostilities with Haiti and authorizing frontier forces and any of the denizens of Cibao and Ozama to raid Haiti for children to be enslaved on Dominican plantations and sold for export[2][1][11][9] (in part a measure meant to compensate the frontier forces for their defense), as well as ordering his comandante Joseph Ruiz to execute any Haitian male over the age of 14 found in Santo Domingo.

Once the various forces met up on the outskirts of the capital, they found the city of 6000 had been fortified in anticipation of their attack, with all of the 2000 French soldiers on the island on the defense.

[7] As dictated by Pichardo: The blacks entered the city like a fury of hell, cutting their throats sword in hand, trampling everything they found, and making blood run everywhere.

Imagine what would be the consternation, terror and fright that that neighborhood, so neglected, fell silent for a moment, in view of similar events, when almost everyone was gathered in the main church, with their pastor imploring divine help, while it represented on the altar the sacrifice of our Redemption, and in readiness to receive communion, as one of the days of the year in which, by custom, even those in the country came to fulfill the annual precept.

[5] Speaking of the particulars of the events of Moca, and the massacre of the towns inhabitants in the church, Pichardo goes on to state: A man who had not yet swallowed the sacramental species, was passed with a bayonet and was left lying at the door of the same sanctuary.

There were at least 40 children with their throats slit and on top of the altar a lady from Santiago, Mrs. Manuela Polanco, a woman from Don Francisco Campos, a member of the Departmental Council, who was sacrificed on the day of the invasion and hung on the arches of the Town Hall, with two or three mortal wounds from which he was dying.

Imagine a blind mass, possessed by the vertigo of crime, pushed as if by an insatiable wind to cross a people who, for tradition, for question of independence, for racial passion, were hated with they hatred of barbarians, with an implacable force.

Ceasing neither before the innocent child who is bayoneted, nor before the venerable priest who officiates, and whose blood stains the pavement of the altar[5] The Otsego Herald newspaper, based in Cooperstown, New York, published details the Dessalines's 1805 campaign and reports on the Massacre at Santiago: Haytian army had gone against Santo Domingo.

[14] Roberto Marte, another Dominican Historian of renown, argues that although the narrative of Pichardo offers some historical value, it cannot be accepted at face value.

Whatever progress he had achieved to these ends was totally reversed by the 1805 invasion, with the path of destruction Dessalines carved on his return to Haiti and the abiding fear of future attacks this led to most of the remaining whites abandoning the colony in the years to come.

[1] The nationalist sentiments prevailing among the Spaniard population of Santo Domingo would be vindicated, in their eyes, by the brutality of Dessalines's campaign.

[17] In the aftermath of the event, and to a greater extent of the later conquest of the island which saw the upper classes lose much of their power, the white elite constructed a Dominican identity in opposition to Haiti: the people of Santo Domingo portrayed as White, Catholic, and culturally Hispanic — The Haitians being the opposite and inferior Black, Voodooist, who were culturally African.

[17] In accordance with this, people in the colonial period of Santo Domingo would refer to themselves as blancos de la tierra (literally whites of the land) irrespective of race.

[17][18] The memory of the Beheadings of Moca would be revived by the Trujillo regime, and be used to justify his policy of the extermination of Haitians from the Dominican Republic.