Two free men of colour ask Paris for equality; one dies on the wheel

By the 1790s the free population of colour numbered about thirty thousand, roughly equal to the whites, many of them educated and rich, and subject to a growing body of discriminatory law that forced them into military service, closed professions to them and regulated what they could wear. In 1789 Vincent Oge and Julien Raimond travelled to Paris to ask the National Assembly for full legal equality including the right to elect deputies, and were outmanoeuvred by the colonial delegates and got nothing. Oge slipped back into the colony and raised an armed rebellion that failed as thoroughly as his petition. He was tortured, his limbs broken on the wheel, and his severed head displayed on a pike. Girard notes the awkward part of their case, that these petitioners argued the Declaration of Rights gave them equality while denying that it required general emancipation, because they owned slaves. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

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.

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.

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.