Insurgents at L'Acul elect a king with a Capuchin officiating

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.

The turning point in Fleurant's account of Haiti is the ritual and political congress held by runaway slaves near Cap Francais in 1791, known as Bwa Kayiman. Calling it a congress rather than only a ceremony is the substance of the claim. The gathering produced a general slave uprising, which became a war of national liberation, which ended in the proclamation of independence on 1 January 1804. Colonial law in Saint-Domingue had banned any meeting of slaves by day or night and had made a policy of mixing people of different African origins on the same estate, so that language, lineage and any tie to the homeland they called Ginen would be lost for good. The religion is what defeated that policy. It bound together people from a wide range of African societies and gave them a common reason to strike, and the success of the revolt owed a great deal to that cohesion.

Girard uses Boukman's speech to demonstrate how thin the surviving record of revolutionary Kreyol really is. Speeches in Kreyol must have been numerous during the Haitian Revolution, but very few survive and those that do were mostly filtered through white authors. The address at the Bois-Caiman ceremony of August 1791 is his extreme case: it comes down to us in the form of a poem in French alexandrines published nearly thirty years after the events. Of Dessalines only fragments reported by the French naturalist Descourtilz remain. Girard finds a more useful source in an anonymous colonist's manuscript which quotes enslaved people's songs and a harangue in Kreyol by the rebel Jean-Francois. The methodological consequence he draws is that historians reconstructing insurgent speech are usually reading literary reconstructions produced by their enemies. Where this account departs from the standard one: Treats the celebrated Bois-Caiman speech as a French literary composition of roughly 1820 rather than a record of what Boukman said.

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.