Working from the commissioners' proclamations and letters in the Archives Nationales, Stein rebuilds the sequence by which slavery ended in the French colony and shows that the familiar date of 29 August 1793 covers one province only. Sonthonax and Polverel had first offered freedom on 21 June to men willing to fight for the republic, then extended it to their wives and to the other provinces. Sonthonax acted alone in the North; Polverel, in the West, had just freed the slaves of abandoned estates and given them those estates in common, and he resented being pre-empted. The third commissioner, Olivier Delpech, based at Les Cayes and concerned above all with the claims of free men of colour, denied that the commission had any right to end slavery. His death in late September removed the obstacle, and Polverel freed the remaining slaves of the West and South on 31 October, weeks before the news reached everyone.