Colonists secretly ask Britain for a protectorate

The chapter argues that outright independence probably never attracted many serious supporters, because island colonies with tiny white populations were far more exposed to blockade, invasion and slave revolt than mainland ones. A British protectorate or takeover was the alternative that could appeal across the spectrum, to liberals, to planters indebted to French merchants and to conservatives who feared the French Revolution's threat to slavery and white supremacy. The first of several secret overtures to the British government came in the aftermath of the massive rebellions by slaves in the north and by free people of colour in the centre and south. This is the evidentiary basis for one of the chapter's central comparative claims, that when Saint-Domingue's colonists sought to throw off French rule between 1791 and 1794 they did so to preserve slavery.

Geggus tracks the speed of the news rather than its influence. By September 1791 enslaved people in Jamaica were singing songs about the events in the neighbouring French colony, and blacks in Havana were believed to be sacrificing pigs in honour of the insurgents. When Louverture occupied Spanish Santo Domingo in early 1801 the enslaved in the hills above Coro in western Venezuela were praising him in song within weeks. A year after independence, alleged conspirators in Trinidad were reported to be parodying the mass with words about eating white men's flesh and remembering Saint-Domingue. He also corrects a widely repeated quotation about black power dissolving white authority, which has been dated to a visit to Rio in 1792 but actually comes from 1806 and refers to the whole hemisphere.

A French militiaman's diary records that on the Sunday after the capture of L'Acul the insurgents celebrated two marriages in the church, assumed titles, treated the titled men with great respect, had a retained Capuchin named Cajetan officiate, consecrated their colours and elected a king, and that they chose one for each quarter they had taken. Thornton argues that although the diarist says nothing about the nationality of the insurgents, the Christian ceremony and above all the Capuchin point to a Kongolese presence, since that order was honoured in Christian Kongo. He supports the reading with Macaya's decision to escape to L'Acul in 1795 after imprisonment by Louverture, where he met with his nation at their dances and assemblies. Elections of this kind were not confined to the northern plain: an elected king ruled the runaway community at Les Platons in 1792.

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.