Bell's Toussaint is already free, and already an owner of a slave

Bell places a hard fact under the rhetoric of 1793. When the revolution broke out, Toussaint was not a slave. He was an ancien libre, free for at least fifteen years, and he had owned a slave himself, a detail he took care that nobody should remember. The mechanism this explains is political. Once Sonthonax announced emancipation, Toussaint had to distinguish himself sharply from the French commissioner and put himself at the head of the men who would be called the nouveaux libres, and his own prior freedom was a liability in that contest. Bell reads the silence about the pre-revolutionary years as deliberate self-fashioning rather than as a gap in the archive. The reading matches the notarial evidence assembled by Geggus and directly contradicts the fifty-years-a-slave account that Beard built his biography on. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against the popular tradition and against Beard, Bell holds that Toussaint was legally free from about 1776 and had himself been a slave owner.

Jean Pierre Boyer was born in the colonial capital in the year the United States declared independence, a coincidence Baur uses to frame a life spent between the Atlantic revolutions. He was in France as a young man, returned home in time for the English invasion of 1793, and later fled again toward France, a voyage interrupted when his ship was taken by Americans during the undeclared naval war between the United States and the French Republic at the end of the decade. Released once the crisis passed, he lived in Paris until the autumn of 1801. The article treats this itinerary as the making of a politician who understood European powers from the inside, and who returned to a country where Dessalines proclaimed independence at the start of 1804 and was killed by an assassin's bullet two years later.

A French mission worked in the kingdoms of Loango and Kakongo north of the river Zaire from 1766 to 1775. The Capuchins had never reached those societies and they had stayed non-Christian, yet the French kept running into individual Christians, enslaved people and traders originally from Soyo, who were delighted to meet a priest. In 1773 a man named Pedro came to tell them that a whole group of Soyo Christians had migrated across the river years before and were living in Kakongo under their own head, Dom Iouan. The prefect went with him to their settlement at Manguenzo, was met by the community, saw the great cross standing in the middle of the village, and went into the chapel to pray while the people sang. In a week the visitors baptised several hundred children. When they came back later to live there they were disappointed and left.

Spanish commercial policy had long kept Santo Domingo poor, taxing and restricting the dealings that its colonists conducted with their French neighbours and with foreign ships. When Charles III came to the Spanish throne and liberalised colonial trade, the colony's economy began to move. Traders from several nations found their way to its coasts. Jose Gabriel Garcia, writing in the 1870s, singled out the 1770s under Brigadier Jose Solano as the happiest and most fortunate stretch of the whole colonial period he was describing. The improvement was brief. Within twenty years the revolution in the French part of the island had begun, and the concern of officials in Santo Domingo shifted from controlling smuggling to keeping revolutionary ideas out. Garcia treated the whole episode as proof of his own liberal argument, that Santo Domingo suffered from Spanish protectionism and prospered whenever Spain relaxed its grip.