France enfranchises some free men of colour and then takes it back

The May debates ended in a compromise giving the vote to men of colour with two free parents while excluding anyone freed from slavery. Most white colonists could not stomach even that, and their deputies quit the assembly, there was talk of secession in Saint-Domingue, and the governor refused to enforce the decree, which caused the National Assembly to reverse course and, in its final days that September, hand control over personal status back to the colonial assemblies. Geggus argues these switchback changes created havoc in the colony and inflamed white and non-white resentments alike. Free men of colour rose again in the summer of 1791 in the central region where they were most numerous and inflicted humbling defeats on forces sent from Port-au-Prince, and white colonists facing a massive slave revolt in the north proved willing to accept their demands until the news of withdrawal arrived.

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.

Oge and Chavanne spent months imprisoned in Santo Domingo pleading not to be sent back, and both appealed to Carlos IV in religious terms without success. After extended debate Spanish officials extradited them and their associates to Saint-Domingue, hoping to dissipate dissent and calm the French. Yingling records what unsettled the Spanish most: Oge's insistence that gens de couleur were men, citizens and French, and had once been treated like their white neighbours. News reached Santo Domingo that just before the scheduled execution in February 1791 armed sympathisers arrived to help, but they failed to ambush the prison guards. The prisoners were then put through public executions designed as deterrence. Governor Blanchelande approved the sentence, and Yingling notes the irony that within days he too would cross into Santo Domingo seeking refuge.

Joseph's fullest treatment of a dated event sits in an endnote. On the night of 14 August 1791, in a forest called Bois-Caiman in the parish of Morne-Rouge in the north, a large group of drivers, about two hundred of them sent from various plantations, gathered on the Lenormand de Mezy estate under the direction of the maroon and religious leader Dutty Boukman and set plans for a large-scale revolt to begin a week later. Joseph cites the testimony of an enslaved man named Francois, who reported that a man of colour read public papers to the assembly and declared that the king and the National Assembly had granted them three days of freedom a week, that the white planters opposed this, and that they must await troops sent to enforce the decree, though people on some estates in Acul and Limbe wanted to begin the war at any cost before the troops arrived. Where this account departs from the standard one: Places the Bois-Caiman gathering itself on 14 August at the Lenormand de Mezy plantation, where Dubois in this batch argues the ceremony fell on 21 August at a different site.