Paris answers with its own draft constitution for the colony

The editors set the Saint-Marc text against a document produced by the Colonial Committee in Paris and published as a pamphlet by the national printing house. It too proposed a constitution, but stated a slightly different set of principles for governing the colony. Both documents, and others related to them from the same period, remained drafts and were never fully implemented. The editors explain what happened instead. Slavery was abolished in the colony in 1793 and, at least in principle, the laws of the French republic were extended to it, and rather than having its own local assemblies the colony was represented in the national assembly in Paris. The attempt to create a separate constitutional order for the colony was therefore set aside for a time in favour of a single body of law across the empire.

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.

Writing to the naval minister on 25 March 1795, the French representative Etienne Laveaux gave figures that explain why emancipation was not optional. Of 10,288 soldiers sent to Saint-Domingue only 990 remained, and of 952 officers only 262. Yellow fever and malaria, not battle, did most of this. Girard notes a French officer's earlier estimate that four white men had to be sent for one to be alive four years later. Former slaves, numbering more than half a million in Saint-Domingue at the start of the revolution and far more resistant to tropical fevers, became the replacement. Regulations required black civilians to keep working on estates even after abolition, so joining the army was a way out of field labour, and the constitution of 1795 reserved the vote to soldiers and the wealthy. By 1796 a third of the officers and seven eighths of the soldiers in Guadeloupe were black.

In 1791 free people of colour in Saint-Domingue armed enslaved men to strengthen their hand against the white colonists who refused them equal rights. The armed men were known as the Swiss, a name borrowed from the mercenary guards of the French king. Once the free coloured leaders obtained the concessions they wanted, the soldiers who had fought for them became an embarrassment. Two hundred and seventeen of them were put aboard ship late that year and carried to the Mosquito Coast of Central America. They were held below deck in irons, and the crews tried to sell them on arrival. Officials at Belize and in Jamaica, worried about what such men might say to the enslaved people around them, refused to let them land. The ships turned back to Saint-Domingue, where the men appear to have been killed without trial. Political exile, sale and massacre ran together in a single voyage, eleven years before the same combination returned on a much larger scale.