Colonists break Oge and Chavannes on the wheel where Makandal burned

Oge had led a few hundred free men of colour in October 1790, asking that the French law of March 1790 guaranteeing equal rights to free men of colour actually be applied. Daut stresses how limited the rebellion was. Nau portrayed Oge and Chavannes as men who trusted law rather than force and turned to violence reluctantly, and Vastey recorded that Oge had saved the life of the enslaver Mazeres. None of it affected the sentence. The two were broken alive on the wheel and their heads set on pikes as a warning, in nearly the same place where Francois Makandal had been burned thirty-three years earlier. Daut argues that the ritual itself is the evidence: white supremacy, a term Vastey would formulate in 1814, was already operating as a system, and the deaths of Makandal and Oge became the twin flashpoints of Haitian revolutionary thought. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

Measuring rebellions by the number of people involved, Geggus finds that no mainland American revolt appears to have mobilised more than a thousand enslaved people, and that only the Louisiana rising of 1811 passed a hundred in North America. The West Indies and Guianas produced eight or nine that reached a thousand or more. Within that group the rising on the northern plain of Saint-Domingue is in a class of its own for magnitude, length and outcome, and it triggered further revolts elsewhere in the colony, at Leogane and Jacmel and on the Cul de Sac plain in early 1792, at Anse a Veau and on the Cayes plain the same year, and possibly in the Artibonite. He notes that in the biggest cases historians stop counting armed men and start estimating everyone living in rebel held ground, which makes the figures soft.

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.

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.