The North rises and the plantations are set alight

Mocombe separates the oath from the attack. On 22 August 1791 the Black population of the North entered open revolt, killing the whites and mulattoes they encountered and setting the colony's estates on fire. The French answered by capturing Boukman quickly and beheading him, then displaying his head on the square at Le Cap, because he had persuaded his followers that he could not be killed and the colony needed the corpse to be seen. Mocombe argues that the decapitation checked the northern rising without ending the war, and that leadership then passed to men of a different formation: Toussaint Louverture, a literate free Black excluded from the Vodou command, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, creole born to African parents. That transfer, for him, is where the revolution's original purpose starts to be redirected. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Beard opens the insurrection on the night of 21 August 1791, a day earlier than the date carried by most accounts.

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.

Mocombe dates the rising itself to the twenty-second, writing that the black population of the north entered into rebellion, killing the whites and mulattoes they encountered and setting the colony's plantations alight. The eight day gap between the ceremony and the rising is deliberate in his account, since it makes the oath an act of organisation with named leaders rather than a spontaneous outburst. He lists the men the priestess had designated as commanders, including Biassou, Jeannot Bullet, Boukman Dutty, Jean Francois and Macaya. The rising took place while the whites and the free people of colour were still fighting each other over participation in colonial government and over equality of opportunity, which for Mocombe is the point: the two struggles were different in kind, and the maroons entered a war that the others had already begun for different reasons.

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.