A peasant saying about signing a name but not a pair of feet gives Sheller her figure for how freedom was exercised after 1804. Mobility, she argues, was the working instrument of people who would accept a contract and then walk away, and its cumulative effect was the collapse of sugar and the rise of coffee, a crop needing little capital and less labour that by 1859 made Haiti the world's fourth largest producer. Against this she sets the machinery built to prevent it: Petion distributing confiscated estates by military rank, then the 1826 Code Rural with its compulsory work contracts, pass system, rural police, and outlawing of collective ownership and self-managed societes. Land-owning generals, not white planters, were the ones enforcing it. The essay closes on the cost of escape. Withdrawal from the state's reach pushed cultivators outside politics altogether, and the Piquet rising appears as the more radical route that was silenced.