Mackandal is executed and the night meetings go on

Mackandal was executed in 1758, the most celebrated of the maroon leaders of Saint Domingue. He exercised a genuine fascination over the people around him, and like the other chiefs he combined the authority of a priest with that of a captain, which is what made him dangerous to the colony rather than merely inconvenient. The masters multiplied punishments without effect. Men taken and handed to the executioner went to their deaths with the pride of martyrs, certain that the outcome they wanted was not in doubt and that their own fate changed nothing. Thirty three years after his execution the enslaved of the northern plain rose together. The faith that carried Mackandal's followers through torture was the same faith that held the insurgents of 1791 to the discipline their leaders imposed. Colonial officials had begun to fear the drums and the night gatherings only when these started to look like preparation for revolt, and Mackandal is the reason they were right.

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.

Mocombe presents Makandal as an oungan from Guinea who turned religious authority into a weapon of war. Working at night, he and his followers burned estates, killed owners and, over roughly six years, poisoned as many as six thousand whites. The French captured him in 1758 and executed him publicly in the square of Cap-Francais, present day Cap-Haitien. The article treats the choice of a public square as deliberate: the colony needed spectators, because Makandal's power rested on the belief among the enslaved that he could not be killed. Mocombe places this in a wider argument that marronage was the most persistent form of refusal, and that maroons in the mountains were not simply fleeing but rebuilding African forms of production, worship and authority from which raids on the plains could be launched.

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.