Oge's rising fails and his followers cross into Spanish territory

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.

The turning point in Fleurant's account of Haiti is the ritual and political congress held by runaway slaves near Cap Francais in 1791, known as Bwa Kayiman. Calling it a congress rather than only a ceremony is the substance of the claim. The gathering produced a general slave uprising, which became a war of national liberation, which ended in the proclamation of independence on 1 January 1804. Colonial law in Saint-Domingue had banned any meeting of slaves by day or night and had made a policy of mixing people of different African origins on the same estate, so that language, lineage and any tie to the homeland they called Ginen would be lost for good. The religion is what defeated that policy. It bound together people from a wide range of African societies and gave them a common reason to strike, and the success of the revolt owed a great deal to that cohesion.

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.

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.