A French decree becomes the template for colonial concordats

Dubois shows the May 1791 decree working on the ground before it worked in Paris. Faced with radical whites in Port-au-Prince, many of them petits blancs, and determined to prevent a slave rising in his region, a commander made peace with the free coloureds instead. He led the administrators of Croix-des-Bouquets and Mirebalais in signing an agreement with the Confederates promising to abide by the decrees of the National Assembly, including that of 15 May 1791 which had given political rights to some free coloureds. That agreement became the template for another signed shortly afterwards between representatives of Port-au-Prince and the men who pointedly called themselves citizens of colour. Their text opened with a history lesson, arguing that provisions passed in their favour in the 1685 Code Noir had been violated by the advance of a ridiculous prejudice.

For a whole month after the rising began, Beard has Toussaint keeping the Breda plantation out of the fire. He stood at the head of the estate gang, held them to obedience and stopped insurgents from putting the cane fields to the torch, while every other white household in the district fled to the towns. Madame Bayou de Libertas stayed in her own house under his protection, and the manager himself, camped at Haut-du-Cap, could come back daily to check on the slaves without being killed. The mechanism was personal standing rather than force. When the insurrection grew past what one man could contain, Toussaint had the carriage loaded with valuables, put his mistress in it and sent her to Cap Francais under his younger brother Paul, then used his growing influence to get the whole family out of the colony to the United States.

On 19 May 1791 the ship Charming Sally tied up at Philadelphia and fifteen people from Saint Domingue came ashore. Five more ships over the following six weeks carried thirty nine others. Eight more between July and December brought eighty two. The traffic then changed character. Nine vessels reached the city in March and April 1792 with thirty seven passengers, sixteen ships in May with one hundred and seventy nine, and another two hundred and forty four people landed between June and August. Over the next thirty months more than three thousand people who had left the French colony entered Philadelphia. The city was then the seat of the national government and the busiest American port for coffee grown on the island, so the news and the people arrived together. Pennsylvania had passed gradual abolition laws in 1780 and 1788 that freed anyone brought into the state and held for six months by an owner settling there, which made the arrival of slaveholders a legal problem from the first week.

Oge and Chavanne spent months imprisoned in Santo Domingo pleading not to be sent back, and both appealed to Carlos IV in religious terms without success. After extended debate Spanish officials extradited them and their associates to Saint-Domingue, hoping to dissipate dissent and calm the French. Yingling records what unsettled the Spanish most: Oge's insistence that gens de couleur were men, citizens and French, and had once been treated like their white neighbours. News reached Santo Domingo that just before the scheduled execution in February 1791 armed sympathisers arrived to help, but they failed to ambush the prison guards. The prisoners were then put through public executions designed as deterrence. Governor Blanchelande approved the sentence, and Yingling notes the irony that within days he too would cross into Santo Domingo seeking refuge.