Insurgent generals say their men expect three free days a week

Dubois uses a negotiation to recover what most insurgents actually thought they were fighting for. In December 1791, while talking with colonial officials, Jean-Francois and Georges Biassou explained that their followers were prey to what the generals called false principles, chiefly the belief that the king had granted the enslaved three days a week, and that these men would feel betrayed if the days were not delivered. In another letter they noted their followers' obstinacy in expecting favours promised by the king. Three free days a week fell well short of liberty, but as a change carrying the seeds of a more autonomous life it would have inspired many. Dubois sets this alongside the royalist symbolism of the insurgent armies, the fleur-de-lis on guards' uniforms and the cross of Saint-Louis worn by Jean-Francois, whom followers called supreme chief of the African army. Where this account departs from the standard one: Presents the insurgent rank and file as fighting in the king's name for concrete concessions rather than for republican liberty.

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.

Dubois handles the most contested night in Haitian history as a problem of evidence. Boukman, who had worked as a driver and then a coachman, was the most visible leader of the first days and was, it is believed, a religious leader, which would have earned him wide respect. Before the revolt he led conspirators in a ceremony in the woods at a place called Bois-Caiman, officiating alongside either an old African woman described as having strange eyes and bristling hair or a green-eyed woman of African and Corsican descent named Cecile Fatiman. Although the service is usually placed just after the meeting of 14 August, Dubois argues it probably took place on the following Sunday, 21 August, at a plantation halfway between Gallifet and Le Cap, which made it a convenient gathering point. Participants swore secrecy and vengeance over the blood of a black pig. Where this account departs from the standard one: Redates the ceremony to 21 August 1791, against the usual placement immediately after the 14 August meeting that other works in this batch adopt.

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.