A creole king of Limbé is broken on the wheel after capture

Thornton uses Jean-Baptiste Cap to break the assumption that the kings elected by insurgent slaves were necessarily Africans. Cap, king of Limbé and Port Margot until his capture, was apparently a creole and was said to own property worth three thousand livres at Cap Français when he was executed on the wheel. The king of the Dondon quarter, Jean-Louis le Parisien, was so called because he had lived for some time in Paris with his owner. Sometimes the king was chosen separately from the military commander, as at Limbé where one report names Barthélémy as chief alongside Boukman with a king named Youé beside them; sometimes the offices merged, as when captured cavalry commander George was carrying a letter signed by a king who was presumably Jean-François. Colonial troops later found the body of one such king, richly dressed and crowned, among the dead at Gallifet.

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.

Girard uses Boukman's speech to demonstrate how thin the surviving record of revolutionary Kreyol really is. Speeches in Kreyol must have been numerous during the Haitian Revolution, but very few survive and those that do were mostly filtered through white authors. The address at the Bois-Caiman ceremony of August 1791 is his extreme case: it comes down to us in the form of a poem in French alexandrines published nearly thirty years after the events. Of Dessalines only fragments reported by the French naturalist Descourtilz remain. Girard finds a more useful source in an anonymous colonist's manuscript which quotes enslaved people's songs and a harangue in Kreyol by the rebel Jean-Francois. The methodological consequence he draws is that historians reconstructing insurgent speech are usually reading literary reconstructions produced by their enemies. Where this account departs from the standard one: Treats the celebrated Bois-Caiman speech as a French literary composition of roughly 1820 rather than a record of what Boukman said.

Geggus tracks the speed of the news rather than its influence. By September 1791 enslaved people in Jamaica were singing songs about the events in the neighbouring French colony, and blacks in Havana were believed to be sacrificing pigs in honour of the insurgents. When Louverture occupied Spanish Santo Domingo in early 1801 the enslaved in the hills above Coro in western Venezuela were praising him in song within weeks. A year after independence, alleged conspirators in Trinidad were reported to be parodying the mass with words about eating white men's flesh and remembering Saint-Domingue. He also corrects a widely repeated quotation about black power dissolving white authority, which has been dated to a visit to Rio in 1792 but actually comes from 1806 and refers to the whole hemisphere.