Healy says the government planned the revolt and picked Toussaint

Healy advances a causal chain that no standard account accepts. After the National Assembly granted civil rights to free men of colour, the white colonists rebelled openly, blood flowed in Port-au-Prince and the situation at Le Cap grew equally alarming. The government, she writes, decided that the best way to cure the colonists of their appetite for independence was to stage a planned slave rebellion, and the governor did not grasp that he was lighting a powder keg. Toussaint, in her telling, was chosen to organise the insurrection, and having found himself suddenly powerful he took no active part in the fighting, spending his time instead training and equipping a few hundred men while cultivators marched on the northern plain. She adds that within eight years that nucleus had grown to thirty thousand disciplined soldiers. Where this account departs from the standard one: Healy has the colonial government deliberately staging the 1791 rising and selecting Toussaint to organise it, against every account in which the revolt was made by the enslaved and Toussaint joined weeks later.

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.