Paris makes Jews citizens, then free men of colour, five months apart

Girard reads the metropolitan debates on Caribbean free people of colour and on French Jews as a single argument conducted twice. Both groups were upwardly mobile, both were discriminated against, and both were French by exception rather than by right even when born on French soil. The 1789 declaration of rights, with its opening claim about equality and its guarantee of religious freedom, gave each campaign its language. Deputies from Saint-Domingue blocked one and deputies from Alsace blocked the other, so neither reached law immediately. Jewish emancipation carried in November 1791 and equality for free men of colour followed in April 1792. Girard stresses how unusual this was anywhere in Europe or the Americas at that moment. The parallel matters for his subject because Isaac Sasportas grew up watching two exclusions be argued over together, which helps explain a merchant who later spoke the language of universal liberty.

Renda separates the two events that other accounts fuse. She states that secret services in the woods of the north nurtured the will to rebel through the summer of 1791, that one such service is said to have taken place on 14 August led by a priest named Boukman and a priestess whose name is not known, and that those present swore an oath of solidarity to revolt. A week later, on the night of 22 August, the enslaved people of the northern plains burned the cane and turned on their owners. She uses the conch shell as her thread. It calls people across distance, summons work gangs, ends the working day and opens a religious service, and marines on patrol more than a century later were badly unnerved by the sound of conches and drums coming out of the hills around them without knowing why. Where this account departs from the standard one: Renda dates the Bois Caiman oath to 14 August 1791 and the rising to 22 August, splitting into two events what many accounts place on a single night.

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.

Yellow fever killed three thousand five hundred or more people in Philadelphia in 1797. Most physicians who could leave the city did leave. One who stayed was Felix Pascalis, who had arrived in the United States in 1793 as a refugee from the Caribbean and had treated fever patients at Benjamin Rush's house on Walnut Street during the epidemic of that year. His book on the 1797 outbreak argued against the common opinion that the disease had been carried in on human bodies aboard ships from Saint-Domingue. He allowed that ships brought it, and held that it moved through wood and air rather than from person to person, rising as putrid exhalations from the timber wharves along the city's two rivers as they dried out. His recommendation was to replace the wharves with stone and coat the stone with tar once a year. The theory was wrong. The habit of plotting cases against places became part of epidemiology.