A limited grant of rights throws the colony toward secession

The barbarity of the execution finally embarrassed the National Assembly into granting political rights to a restricted number of free men of colour. The colonial response was refusal. The governor declined to implement the decree, some whites plotted secession, and free coloureds went into rebellion in the south and west where their numbers matched those of whites. The fighting was vicious and the atrocities on both sides made later reconciliation hard. When France decreed full racial equality on 4 April 1792, most white colonists accepted it, because by then they faced an enemy they could not defeat without the military skills of free men of colour. The chapter notes that before 1789 racial equality had meant the right to practise as a doctor or lawyer, while afterwards it meant access to political power, which is what made compromise impossible.

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.

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.

In Mocombe's account the revolution opens with a religious assembly rather than with an attack. On 14 August 1791, in the mountains of the northern corridor, elders and delegates of the different African nations gathered for a Petwo ceremony. Cecile Fatiman, a manbo mounted by the lwa Ezili Dantor, cut the throat of a black pig and passed the blood to the participants, who swore to unite and to build a society on new principles. She then named the leadership: Georges Biassou, Jeannot, Jean-Francois and Macaya. Mocombe reports the late Max Beauvoir's claim that a human being was in fact sacrificed that night, and that kochon nwa was the French label for maroons. His larger point is that the assembly, run by oungan, manbo, gangan and elders, cannot be squeezed into a Hegelian struggle for recognition. Where this account departs from the standard one: Dates the ceremony and the start of the revolution to 14 August, where Dubois in this same batch argues for 21 August, and rejects Buck-Morss's reading of the revolution through Hegel's master and slave.