Marie-Rose Masson buys her freedom and never gets the papers

Dubois follows one woman through the wreckage to show how fragile purchased freedom was. In February 1791 Marie-Rose Masson handed the Gallifet plantation manager Odeluc 3,342 livres, roughly what a trader would charge for two infants, and the price of liberty for herself and her mother. Her father had been Odeluc's predecessor as manager and had died soon after her birth; Odeluc had raised her and had agreed in 1787 to let her buy her liberty, and it had taken her four years to gather the sum. When she paid, he gave her a receipt but put off signing the emancipation papers. In August he was killed at La Gossette during the insurrection. Dubois uses the episode to register the irony that the rising which freed a colony left this particular claim to freedom undocumented and unenforceable.

Measuring rebellions by the number of people involved, Geggus finds that no mainland American revolt appears to have mobilised more than a thousand enslaved people, and that only the Louisiana rising of 1811 passed a hundred in North America. The West Indies and Guianas produced eight or nine that reached a thousand or more. Within that group the rising on the northern plain of Saint-Domingue is in a class of its own for magnitude, length and outcome, and it triggered further revolts elsewhere in the colony, at Leogane and Jacmel and on the Cul de Sac plain in early 1792, at Anse a Veau and on the Cayes plain the same year, and possibly in the Artibonite. He notes that in the biggest cases historians stop counting armed men and start estimating everyone living in rebel held ground, which makes the figures soft.

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.

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.