White planters at Saint-Marc declare their own assembly sovereign

While the planter lobby in Paris spent early 1790 persuading deputies that any change in colonial affairs would ruin French prosperity, the colonists at home moved much further than the metropolitan debate. Planters, lawyers and merchants turned the militia into a National Guard and expelled the unpopular intendant. Provincial assemblies were elected on an unusually wide white male suffrage, forced by the demands of white wage earners, and in April 1790 a colonial assembly met at Saint-Marc and declared itself sovereign, drafting a constitution that largely disregarded French authority. The governor gathered conservative forces over the summer and closed it down, but when a successor body was elected with French approval in the summer of 1791 the radical majority renamed it the General Assembly and took over executive functions. Geggus stresses that the settlers' appetite for autonomy long predated 1789 and was not learned in France.

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.

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 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.