Popkin builds a book around one afternoon. On 20 June 1793 in Cap Francais, free men of colour ran through the streets telling the city's slaves they were free. Outnumbered by mutinous sailors and by the general France had dispatched to fight the insurgents, the republican commissioners had appealed to the enslaved majority for support.

For the first time, agents of a European power took a step pointing toward the end of slavery; the Convention decreed abolition in February 1794 as a direct consequence. White survivors remembered instead the burning of the richest port in France's colonies: three days of fighting killed between three and ten thousand people, more than any comparable episode in revolutionary Paris.

The consequences spread. Planters called in Britain and Spain, turning the colony into a front in the European war, while free people of colour found their victory bound up with the arming of citizens they had not meant to create.