An English clergyman defends the rebel slaves in print

One of the earliest British reactions to the August rising in the northern plain was a pamphlet by the abolitionist clergyman and poet Percival Stockdale containing an impassioned defence of the rebels. Hormann uses it as the first piece of evidence against the claim that contemporaries could not conceive of a slave revolution. Stockdale affirms both the human rights of the enslaved and the legitimacy of seizing those rights by force, in print, in Britain, in the same year as the revolt. The chapter sets this beside the more cautious position of Thomas Clarkson, the chief propagandist of British abolition, whose anonymous pamphlet on the revolt the following year also treated the human rights of the enslaved as the central question, while carefully distancing the British campaign from the increasingly radical French revolutionaries and their abolitionist society. Where this account departs from the standard one: Trouillot holds that in 1791 there was no public debate anywhere on the right of black slaves to self determination by armed resistance; Hormann answers with named British texts from that very year.

Dubois separates the planning meeting from the religious ceremony, and gives the meeting the organisational weight. On Sunday 14 August 1791, just over a week before the insurrection began, two hundred enslaved people gathered on the Lenormand de Mezy plantation in the parish of Morne-Rouge. They were delegates from estates across the central northern plain, including Limbe, Petite-Anse where the Gallifet plantations lay, Port Margot, Limonade, Plaine du Nord and Quartier Morin. Gatherings of this kind had happened before and were common enough that several planters had given permission for what they were told was a dinner. This one was different: final plans for a mass uprising were made. Most delegates were privileged people, many of them drivers. Dubois reads the choice of delegates as the reason the plan held across dozens of estates without leaking.

The clearest demonstration of Girard's thesis is the Saint Lucia expedition of June 1795. Victor Hugues sent about three hundred men from Guadeloupe against twenty four hundred well equipped British soldiers. They carried the promise of freedom, drew heavy support from the enslaved population, fought as guerillas and took the island. The naming of the resulting force is itself part of the history. British reports called the men who joined brigands, the word normally used for maroons, while French accounts called them the French army of the woods. Hugues ran the same play elsewhere, using the black Caribs of Saint Vincent, sponsoring a large rising in Grenada across 1795 and 1796, and drawing up smaller schemes against Saint Christopher and Curacao. Girard notes that several of these islands had been French within living memory and still held French speaking populations, so the campaign for black freedom doubled as a bid to recover lost territory.

Speaking to the African Masonic Lodge in Boston, Prince Hall, who had fought in the war against Britain, told his brethren not to be cast down under the abuses they laboured under, because the darkest hour comes before daybreak. He asked them to remember how dark a day it had been for their African brethren six years earlier in the French West Indies, when nothing but the snap of the whip was heard from morning to evening. Jackson uses the speech to open a two century argument. Black and white Americans took opposite meanings from the same events, with white reaction running to shock, fear, surveillance and harsh law, while black Americans saw in Haiti and in the figure of Toussaint the possibilities of their race and its movement toward freedom.