Free people of colour hold a third of the land and a quarter of the slaves

By 1789 the free people of colour in Saint-Domingue held about a third of the land, a quarter of the enslaved population and a quarter of the built property, along with a solid position in commerce and the trades. Many had served in the American war of independence and carried the military prestige that came with it. Their legal position moved the other way. They had no political rights. They were told what clothes they could wear and were seated apart from whites in churches and theatres. Some, acknowledged sons of wealthy white fathers, inherited a name or a fortune and were sent to France to be educated. The same men reproduced the ranking below them. Free blacks were kept out of their dances. A free black rarely bought a mulatto or a quarteron as a slave, since such a purchase was held to be a dishonour worth dying to avoid. Seventeen thousand of the enslaved, about two and a half in every hundred, were themselves counted as mulatto.

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.

Measuring rebellions by the number of people involved, Geggus finds that no mainland American revolt appears to have mobilised more than a thousand enslaved people, and that only the Louisiana rising of 1811 passed a hundred in North America. The West Indies and Guianas produced eight or nine that reached a thousand or more. Within that group the rising on the northern plain of Saint-Domingue is in a class of its own for magnitude, length and outcome, and it triggered further revolts elsewhere in the colony, at Leogane and Jacmel and on the Cul de Sac plain in early 1792, at Anse a Veau and on the Cayes plain the same year, and possibly in the Artibonite. He notes that in the biggest cases historians stop counting armed men and start estimating everyone living in rebel held ground, which makes the figures soft.

In Mocombe's account the revolution opens with a religious assembly rather than with an attack. On 14 August 1791, in the mountains of the northern corridor, elders and delegates of the different African nations gathered for a Petwo ceremony. Cecile Fatiman, a manbo mounted by the lwa Ezili Dantor, cut the throat of a black pig and passed the blood to the participants, who swore to unite and to build a society on new principles. She then named the leadership: Georges Biassou, Jeannot, Jean-Francois and Macaya. Mocombe reports the late Max Beauvoir's claim that a human being was in fact sacrificed that night, and that kochon nwa was the French label for maroons. His larger point is that the assembly, run by oungan, manbo, gangan and elders, cannot be squeezed into a Hegelian struggle for recognition. Where this account departs from the standard one: Dates the ceremony and the start of the revolution to 14 August, where Dubois in this same batch argues for 21 August, and rejects Buck-Morss's reading of the revolution through Hegel's master and slave.