A letter to Biassou puts Toussaint at the planning of an attack

Bell works from the thin documentary record of Toussaint's first two years in the insurrection. A letter he wrote to Biassou on 15 October 1791 refers obscurely to what looks like a planned attack on the outskirts of Cap Francais, possibly on the town itself. The mechanism of Bell's reconstruction is correspondence written by other people. He supplements the letters with a series that Biassou sent to the Abbe Delahaye, the parish priest of Dondon, captured when that mountain town fell, and notes that both Jeannot and Biassou treated the priest with unusual consideration. From scraps of this kind Bell builds a picture of Toussaint operating as a staff officer and negotiator inside Biassou's camp rather than as a field commander, which is why he can say that Toussaint stepped onto the public stage only with the Camp Turel proclamation two years later.

Between 1783 and 1792 the outfitters of Nantes sent ships to the African coast and sold the people they carried in the French Caribbean, above all in Saint-Domingue. Twenty six of those expeditions have surviving accounts, and one figure decides almost all of them. Where the fitting out cost worked out at between 950 and 1,000 livres for each captive delivered, the voyage came out level. Below that it earned and above that it lost, and the further the figure sat from the band the larger the gain or the loss. In 1788 the Sainte Anne, fitted out by Clanchy and Parran for about 380,000 livres, landed 440 people at a delivered cost of 866 livres each while the sale price stood near 1,550, and the accounts closed well. Joubert's Aigle cost about 400,000 livres in 1786 and sold only 260 people, putting the delivered cost above 1,500 against a sale price of 1,300, and it failed.

Mocombe dates the rising itself to the twenty-second, writing that the black population of the north entered into rebellion, killing the whites and mulattoes they encountered and setting the colony's plantations alight. The eight day gap between the ceremony and the rising is deliberate in his account, since it makes the oath an act of organisation with named leaders rather than a spontaneous outburst. He lists the men the priestess had designated as commanders, including Biassou, Jeannot Bullet, Boukman Dutty, Jean Francois and Macaya. The rising took place while the whites and the free people of colour were still fighting each other over participation in colonial government and over equality of opportunity, which for Mocombe is the point: the two struggles were different in kind, and the maroons entered a war that the others had already begun for different reasons.

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.