Paris grants political rights to a sliver of Saint-Domingue's free men

The National Constituent Assembly issued a decree that admitted free men of colour to parish and colonial assemblies, but only where both father and mother had themselves been free. The wording narrowed the promise sharply, since most free people of colour in the colony had at least one parent who had been enslaved. Woodward treats the measure as the trigger rather than the remedy. White colonists who had already captured the colonial assembly and the provincial assembly at Port-au-Prince simply refused to recognise the new rights, and the refusal set free men of colour against the lower whites who had organised themselves into clubs calling themselves Patriots. Woodward stresses that the abolitionist society in France had lobbied hard for the decree, which made it look to colonists like metropolitan interference rather than local law. The strife that followed within months grew out of this deadlock over who counted as a citizen.

For a whole month after the rising began, Beard has Toussaint keeping the Breda plantation out of the fire. He stood at the head of the estate gang, held them to obedience and stopped insurgents from putting the cane fields to the torch, while every other white household in the district fled to the towns. Madame Bayou de Libertas stayed in her own house under his protection, and the manager himself, camped at Haut-du-Cap, could come back daily to check on the slaves without being killed. The mechanism was personal standing rather than force. When the insurrection grew past what one man could contain, Toussaint had the carriage loaded with valuables, put his mistress in it and sent her to Cap Francais under his younger brother Paul, then used his growing influence to get the whole family out of the colony to the United States.

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.

In Mocombe's account the revolution opens with a religious assembly rather than with an attack. On 14 August 1791, in the mountains of the northern corridor, elders and delegates of the different African nations gathered for a Petwo ceremony. Cecile Fatiman, a manbo mounted by the lwa Ezili Dantor, cut the throat of a black pig and passed the blood to the participants, who swore to unite and to build a society on new principles. She then named the leadership: Georges Biassou, Jeannot, Jean-Francois and Macaya. Mocombe reports the late Max Beauvoir's claim that a human being was in fact sacrificed that night, and that kochon nwa was the French label for maroons. His larger point is that the assembly, run by oungan, manbo, gangan and elders, cannot be squeezed into a Hegelian struggle for recognition. Where this account departs from the standard one: Dates the ceremony and the start of the revolution to 14 August, where Dubois in this same batch argues for 21 August, and rejects Buck-Morss's reading of the revolution through Hegel's master and slave.