Hardly anyone among the colony's free people of color was richer than Oge, which makes his conduct in 1790 hard to explain. Men of his standing were cautious, backing Julien Raimond's slow campaign in Paris for rights grounded in property rather than color, a program built to leave slavery intact. Oge instead returned home, took the head of armed militiamen demanding the vote, and four months later was broken on the wheel.

Reading the record of his interrogation, Garrigus finds a man undone by his own earlier success. A broker who had grown rich drafting contracts with white colonists and then lost the fortune, he was used to being dealt with as an equal and underestimated how far planters' fear of Parisian abolitionists had hardened.

The testimony also unsettles the military story: no battle crushed the movement, its members dispersed. What counted was the execution, which drew poorer men of mixed ancestry into arms and toward civil war.