The enslaved rise and leave the French revolutionaries no choice

Dupuy uses the uprising to settle the question of who abolished slavery. Before it, he notes with Carolyn Fick, none of the members of the Jacobin clubs, including Robespierre and Marat, was prepared to touch the slave trade. The colonial whites were divided on autonomy from France but united on preserving slavery, and understood that conceding equality to free men of colour would open the whole question. A spokesman for the planters put the sequence plainly, saying that equal rights for free coloured men today meant emancipated slaves tomorrow. Julien Raymond argued the opposite way, that the interests of free people of colour should come first. The metropolitan answer to the rising was a half measure, granting equal rights only to some free coloureds, which provoked white terror against people of colour in the colony and demands that the decree be withdrawn.

Boukman Dutty had been a driver and a coachman on the Lenormand de Mezy plantation, which meant he knew a great many work gangs across the northern plain, and he was a priest as well. Accounts left by planters and parish priests indicate careful planning in deep secrecy. A first meeting between the maroon camps led to a second, held on 14 August 1791 and framed as a religious ceremony over which Boukman presided. The gathering has come down as Bois-Caiman. Fact and legend are thoroughly mixed in what survives of it. The participants are said to have shared the blood of a sacrificed black pig and sworn a pact to die rather than live under the masters, while Boukman spoke in Creole and called for vengeance in the name of the ancestors. A young priestess remembered as Cecile Fatiman cut the animal's throat. The rising began eight days later.

Joseph's fullest treatment of a dated event sits in an endnote. On the night of 14 August 1791, in a forest called Bois-Caiman in the parish of Morne-Rouge in the north, a large group of drivers, about two hundred of them sent from various plantations, gathered on the Lenormand de Mezy estate under the direction of the maroon and religious leader Dutty Boukman and set plans for a large-scale revolt to begin a week later. Joseph cites the testimony of an enslaved man named Francois, who reported that a man of colour read public papers to the assembly and declared that the king and the National Assembly had granted them three days of freedom a week, that the white planters opposed this, and that they must await troops sent to enforce the decree, though people on some estates in Acul and Limbe wanted to begin the war at any cost before the troops arrived. Where this account departs from the standard one: Places the Bois-Caiman gathering itself on 14 August at the Lenormand de Mezy plantation, where Dubois in this batch argues the ceremony fell on 21 August at a different site.

One week after the north burned, a delegation of Saint-Domingue planters arrived in the United States asking for military and financial help to put the rising down. Julius Scott's account of what happened next is the useful part. The American response was tangled, because the same republic that had just finished its own revolution had a slaveholding South that badly wanted this fire extinguished, and a merchant class that badly wanted the Saint-Domingue trade to keep running. Aid was sent. It was also hedged. What Scott tracks in The Common Wind is the other network moving in the same water: sailors, dockworkers, runaways and free black mariners carrying news of the rising into every port in the Caribbean and up the American coast faster than any government could suppress it. The planters sailed north to ask for soldiers. The news had already sailed north without them.