The planters go to Philadelphia for help, and hit a wall of American self-interest

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.

The turning point in Fleurant's account of Haiti is the ritual and political congress held by runaway slaves near Cap Francais in 1791, known as Bwa Kayiman. Calling it a congress rather than only a ceremony is the substance of the claim. The gathering produced a general slave uprising, which became a war of national liberation, which ended in the proclamation of independence on 1 January 1804. Colonial law in Saint-Domingue had banned any meeting of slaves by day or night and had made a policy of mixing people of different African origins on the same estate, so that language, lineage and any tie to the homeland they called Ginen would be lost for good. The religion is what defeated that policy. It bound together people from a wide range of African societies and gave them a common reason to strike, and the success of the revolt owed a great deal to that cohesion.

Girard's conclusion turns a linguistic profile into a political verdict. Born to Arada parents in a French Caribbean colony, Toussaint lived at the intersection of African, American and European worlds but did not weigh them equally. By pushing Ewe-Fon into the background, Girard argues, he buries pan-African interpretations of his career. Unlike the autonomist planters of the eighteenth century or Haitian nationalists today, he did not use Kreyol to assert creole pride, which cuts against readings of him as a proto-independentist. The language he preferred in writing, and often in speech, was the one he associated with social advancement: French, the language of a colonial system he never got out of. Girard characterises his French as laborious and almost ashamed, the French of a provincial arriving in the capital full of ambition and trying to hide his accent. Where this account departs from the standard one: Argues against both the pan-African and the proto-independentist readings of Toussaint, on the evidence of his linguistic choices rather than his politics.

Girard uses Boukman's speech to demonstrate how thin the surviving record of revolutionary Kreyol really is. Speeches in Kreyol must have been numerous during the Haitian Revolution, but very few survive and those that do were mostly filtered through white authors. The address at the Bois-Caiman ceremony of August 1791 is his extreme case: it comes down to us in the form of a poem in French alexandrines published nearly thirty years after the events. Of Dessalines only fragments reported by the French naturalist Descourtilz remain. Girard finds a more useful source in an anonymous colonist's manuscript which quotes enslaved people's songs and a harangue in Kreyol by the rebel Jean-Francois. The methodological consequence he draws is that historians reconstructing insurgent speech are usually reading literary reconstructions produced by their enemies. Where this account departs from the standard one: Treats the celebrated Bois-Caiman speech as a French literary composition of roughly 1820 rather than a record of what Boukman said.