Oge's revolt and savage execution shame Paris into a half measure

Free men of colour who expected to share in the colony's political transformation asked for the same rights as white taxpayers and were evaded, refused, and in some districts fiercely repressed. Geggus points out that the arrival of democracy made their claim harder rather than easier, since equality now meant political power and not merely access to professions, and colonists insisted that racial discrimination was a structural support of slavery. Vincent Oge, one of the few merchants of colour in the colony and one of its spokesmen in Paris, returned home and led a short unsuccessful rising in October 1790. The barbaric execution of Oge and his followers finally embarrassed the National Assembly into granting equal rights in May 1791 to a small number of free people of colour, a weak gesture that the majority of white colonists flatly rejected.

The engravings of the revolution are remarkable for their narrowness. Where the visual record of the French and American revolutions follows events year by year and sometimes month by month, that of the Haitian Revolution fixes on two moments at Cap Francais, the rising of 1791 and the fighting of 1793, and then jumps to the independence campaign of the early 1800s. Many prints were made in Europe by people who had never crossed the Atlantic, whose aims ranged from selling an arresting picture to damping enthusiasm for abolition to attacking the French revolutionary government. As a group they show black violence against white residents and property and pass over the brutality of white men toward people of African descent. White draws the political consequence. Readers in Europe and America learned of abolition and of black troops defeating British invaders in text, but what they saw was the port on fire. Where this account departs from the standard one: White argues the Haitian Revolution was made into a race war partly by objects, against accounts that treat the racial framing as a straightforward description of events.

Yingling uses the border as his instrument for reading the whole island, and this crossing is his sharpest illustration. In March 1791 the French governor of Saint-Domingue took refuge in Santo Domingo from white crowds in Port-au-Prince stirred up by the revolution in France. The route he used was the one already worn by maroons, merchants, cattle herders, exiles and families, and it had just been used by the free coloured dissidents he had helped condemn. The colony had been coming apart since 1789: elected assemblies and militias had undermined the governor's authority, the Colonial Assembly of Saint-Marc had drafted a constitution rebuffing metropolitan oversight and flirting with independence, and petits blancs in Port-au-Prince confronted him with demands modelled on the sans-culottes. Spanish observers concluded the French colony was already lost.

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.