Boukman is gunned down and his head raised on a stake at Le Cap

Dubois marks the point at which the first generation of leaders was cleared away and the second took over. In mid-November 1791 Boukman was surrounded by a troop of cavalry and shot down during a battle. He was decapitated, his body burned by French troops in full view of the insurgent camps, and his head displayed on a stake in the main plaza of Le Cap. The man who killed him collected the large bounty offered for the heads of rebel chiefs. Jean-Baptiste Cap, elected king of Limbe and Port-Margot in late August, had already been captured while recruiting on a plantation and broken on the wheel. By late November, Jean-Francois and Georges Biassou were the leading insurgent commanders in the northern plain, having survived while others fell. Insurgents lamented Boukman as killed defending his king.

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.

In 1792 Benjamin Rush drafted a plan for a peace office in the federal government and specified its decoration, including ploughshares beaten from swords and five life sized paintings. Four showed enemies reconciled, a Native American and a Kentucky settler cooking venison in one pot, Cornwallis and Tipu Sultan sharing a decanter of Madeira, French and Austrian soldiers dancing arm in arm. The fifth proposed a Saint-Domingue planter, a man of colour and a native of Africa legislating together in one colonial assembly. White reads the timing closely. The French law of 4 April 1792 had just granted political rights to free men of colour, which white colonists were obstructing, so the picture endorsed that law, and by seating an African in the chamber it anticipated by nearly two years the decision to free the enslaved and make black men citizens. The plan appeared in Benjamin Banneker's almanac.

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.