The great rising began among creoles, not the newly landed Africans

Saint-Domingue's slave trade grew steeply between 1785 and 1790, which makes it tempting to explain the 1791 revolt as the arithmetic result of mass African arrivals. Geggus refuses the inference. The revolt began in the most creolised district of the colony and its leadership came largely from people born locally, while the most heavily African districts were the last to join the revolution. He accepts that elsewhere the correlation between heavy slave imports and rebellion holds, in Bahia, in central Brazil and in Cuba after 1795, but he points to the British colonies as a counter case, where three late rebellions on creolised ground, Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831, undermine any attempt to tie revolt to a recent African presence. The same reasoning explains why Curacao's two large risings occurred when its enslaved population was already thoroughly creolised. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against demographic explanations of the Haitian Revolution, Geggus insists the revolt started in the most creolised zone and that African districts joined last.

Geggus closes his study with an episode from August 1791, about a week before the revolt broke out across the plain. Fire had been started in several cane pieces at Haut-du-Cap, and the slaves rallied round Toussaint and the driver Bruno to put it out. With the manager absent, they then cut and processed the cane on their own initiative before it could spoil. When the general uprising began, the same anonymous source, probably Bayon de Libertat, reports that the Haut-du-Cap workforce did not join in but stayed on the estate, though Geggus adds that they may have had little choice once the place became a military camp. Two years later, after Le Cap burned and slavery was abolished, the same people offered at Toussaint's urging to provide for the ruined attorney's family.

On 10 May 1795 Jose Caridad Gonzalez, an African from the Loango coast, joined Jose Leonardo Chirino in leading a rising of enslaved and free Black people in the Coro district of Venezuela. It was not the first of its kind there. A rebellion around Caracas in 1749 was led by a man remembered as Miguel Loango. Central Africans shipped through Loango made up a large part of the enslaved population of Maracaibo, Caracas, the state of Falcon and the Barlovento district of Miranda. The coastal town of Curiepe, founded in the seventeenth century by two men called Manuel and Antonio Congo, was the first settlement of free Black people in the country. The demands raised in 1795 were taken up two years later by Manuel Gual and Jose Maria Espana, whose conspiracy Venezuela treats as a founding act. The port that filled Saint-Domingue filled Venezuela as well, and risings followed in both places.

Speaking to the African Masonic Lodge in Boston, Prince Hall, who had fought in the war against Britain, told his brethren not to be cast down under the abuses they laboured under, because the darkest hour comes before daybreak. He asked them to remember how dark a day it had been for their African brethren six years earlier in the French West Indies, when nothing but the snap of the whip was heard from morning to evening. Jackson uses the speech to open a two century argument. Black and white Americans took opposite meanings from the same events, with white reaction running to shock, fear, surveillance and harsh law, while black Americans saw in Haiti and in the figure of Toussaint the possibilities of their race and its movement toward freedom.