Makandal promises the extermination of the masters and supplies the means

Francois Makandal, a Muslim from Guinea, became the best known of the maroon leaders in 1757. He prophesied that the white masters would be wiped out. He spread terror among them by preparing poisons that killed slowly, and he supplied rebellious slaves with talismans called garde-corps, which were held to make the wearer invulnerable to weapons and to remove all fear of white people. Several groups of maroons were said to be under his command. His name outlived him in the language of the colony. Makandal became the general word in Saint-Domingue for a talisman or a poison, and later for the ceremonies in which such charms were made. That linguistic afterlife is the measure of what he achieved. A man who has been executed can still be a working category in the vocabulary of the people who executed him, and every planter who used the word was repeating his name without meaning to.

From the late 1750s the enslaved people of New Orleans gathered every Sunday on an open piece of ground behind the city to trade and to enjoy themselves. They were Bambara, Mandingo, Wolof, Fulbe, Fon and Yoruba, and they were joined by free people of colour and by Native Americans. The site had been used for the corn feasts of the Houma before the French came. It was known as the Place des Negres and later as Congo Square. What went on there was drumming and dancing performed in public by hundreds of people of African descent, the bamboula, the calinda, the coujaille and the pile chactas, all of them related to Vodou rites, and it was the market where the charms called gris gris were sold. The word comes from Mende, spoken by Mandingo and Bambara people. No other place in the United States let African religion be performed so openly for so long.

Dessalines was born into slavery at Duclos in the north on 20 September 1758 and took the name of the free black man who later owned him. He rose through the war as a field commander rather than a diplomat, and that difference decided everything about 1804. Toussaint negotiated with France for autonomy inside the French system. Dessalines concluded that no arrangement with France was survivable and declared independence outright on the first of January 1804. He then ordered the killing of the remaining French population, wrote white land ownership out of the constitution, and crowned himself Emperor. He was assassinated in 1806 by people who had fought beside him. Haiti spent the next century deciding whether he was the founder or the warning, and the honest answer is that the country has never fully settled it.

Geggus offers what he calls a minimum tally of about a hundred and eighty incidents of slave rebellion and conspiracy across the Americas, and argues that the 1790s stand out as the period of peak intensity, with 1795 possibly unique for the number of separate incidents in different societies. His appendix lists Curaçao twice in January and August of that year alongside Coro, Pointe Coupée in Louisiana, Nassau, Puerto Principe, Aguadilla, Demerara, Aruba, Buenos Aires, Trinidad, Bayamo and Samaná. He notes that the rough parity between Brazil with twenty-seven incidents and the United States with twenty-five is probably an artefact of the American supply of local newspapers rather than of slave behaviour. Only the 1811 rising in the Louisiana territory mobilised more than a hundred slaves in North America, while the West Indies and Guianas produced at least eight or nine risings of a thousand or more. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus rejects Eugene Genovese's schema in which the French Revolution produced a new revolutionary type of slave uprising superseding earlier restorationist ones, on the ground that Genovese never supplied a plausible example of the new type.