A maroon hunter disperses every band in three months

At the start of the Revolution, public alarm about maroons led to the revival of a free coloured corps led by Milscent de Musset, who had built a high reputation the previous decade as a maroon fighter. He claimed that although public opinion credited him with combating between two and ten thousand fugitives, he dispersed all bands within three months after killing or capturing seventy people. Geggus uses the gap between the two figures as a measure of how much of the maroon problem was perception. He adds a geographical point that cuts against the Fouchard thesis: the areas where maroon bands were said to be present on the eve of the Revolution, including Port de Paix, Gros Morne, Mirebalais, Arcahaye and Grand'Anse, were not where the slave revolt broke out and were generally where the slave regime suffered least.

Vincent Oge, a wealthy mulatre planter from the Nord who was a slaveholder and merchant, returned from revolutionary Paris in October 1790 carrying claims to citizenship rights for propertied free people of colour. With Jean-Baptiste Chavanne he gathered roughly three hundred supporters, mostly gens de couleur, and led armed protests. After French forces crushed them in November 1790, Oge, Chavanne and many followers fled into Santo Domingo, some trying to shelter with the Maniel maroons. Yingling's interest is in what crossing the border did. Spanish officials scrambled to quarantine what they saw as revolutionary contagion in a society with an even higher proportion of free people of colour than Saint-Domingue, and the refugees exposed Dominicans directly to the political and social critiques coming out of the French colony. The quarantine did not hold.

A week before the burnings began, a group of rebel commanders held a ceremony at Morne Rouge, at the place called Bwa Kayiman, where the oungan and rebel leader Boukman prayed for support. The article stresses that Trouillot situates this within a wider pattern rather than treating it as unique: many guerrilla leaders held ceremonies before fighting, Biassou told the enslaved not to flee death because the spirits would return them to Africa, and three quarters of the leaders named, including Boukman, Biassou, Yasint, Lamour Derance and Romaine-la-Prophetesse, were oungan before they were commanders. Calinda dances were the only gatherings the enslaved were permitted, so a dance was simultaneously a cultural event, a religious event and a political meeting. Vodou supplied conviction and organisation at once, working as an adhesive across people separated by language and origin. Where this account departs from the standard one: Rejects both conventional readings of Bwa Kayiman, that it was merely a political congress and that it was merely a mystical ceremony.

Girard gives the arithmetic of the sugar economy without softening it. In 1700 there were about nine thousand enslaved people in the whole colony. In 1790, at the height of its prosperity, it imported forty eight thousand in that single year and the enslaved population passed five hundred thousand. He attributes the scale of importation to mortality rather than to growth, since between five and six percent of the enslaved population died every year. His explanation is structural rather than moral. Sugar needed acreage, machinery and hundreds of workers, so estates were large and often owned by absentees in Cap Francais or Paris who hired managers paid on the year's crop, which gave the managers every reason to work people to death for short term profit. He adds that yellow fever and malaria killed newly arrived whites at an even higher rate than newly arrived Africans. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard attributes the high death rate mainly to sugar, climate and absentee management rather than to any special viciousness of French planters.