Late colonial Saint-Domingue was among the most heavily masonic societies anywhere, and it produced the only successful slave revolution, so the temptation to connect the two has been hard to resist. One biographer builds a conspiracy on it, imagining lodge ties between the future Toussaint Louverture and the royalist planters said to have put him up to the rising of 1791.

The evidence usually cited is a signature. Toussaint and roughly three hundred other men, white and of color, marked their names with a distinctive arrangement of dots. Garrigus went looking for those men in the records of actual lodges and found almost nothing, a result that also obliges him to revise his own earlier conclusion about a supposed hidden lodge at Aquin.

His suggestion is that the mark was aspirational: men used it to imply membership in brotherhoods that did not exist, which says more about the prestige of secrecy than about how the revolution was organized.