The rebel commanders offer to sell the revolt for their own freedom

Within months the leadership that came out of the August meeting had turned on itself. Jeannot became notorious for torturing white captives, and Jean-Francois arrested him and had him executed, hanging his body on a butcher's hook. Boukman was killed fighting French troops and his head displayed on a stake. Then in December 1791 Jean-Francois and Biassou offered the hard pressed French a deal, peace in exchange for freedom and amnesty for the slave leaders. French commissioners took the offer seriously. The people expected to go back to the fields while their commanders enjoyed the liberty their blood had bought were not enthusiastic, and the deal collapsed. Girard rejects the explanation that illiterate leaders simply did not understand what they were doing, arguing instead that they had rapidly acquired a talent for political duplicity, which also explains their royalist rhetoric.

Between 1783 and 1792 the outfitters of Nantes sent ships to the African coast and sold the people they carried in the French Caribbean, above all in Saint-Domingue. Twenty six of those expeditions have surviving accounts, and one figure decides almost all of them. Where the fitting out cost worked out at between 950 and 1,000 livres for each captive delivered, the voyage came out level. Below that it earned and above that it lost, and the further the figure sat from the band the larger the gain or the loss. In 1788 the Sainte Anne, fitted out by Clanchy and Parran for about 380,000 livres, landed 440 people at a delivered cost of 866 livres each while the sale price stood near 1,550, and the accounts closed well. Joubert's Aigle cost about 400,000 livres in 1786 and sold only 260 people, putting the delivered cost above 1,500 against a sale price of 1,300, and it failed.

In 1792 Benjamin Rush drafted a plan for a peace office in the federal government and specified its decoration, including ploughshares beaten from swords and five life sized paintings. Four showed enemies reconciled, a Native American and a Kentucky settler cooking venison in one pot, Cornwallis and Tipu Sultan sharing a decanter of Madeira, French and Austrian soldiers dancing arm in arm. The fifth proposed a Saint-Domingue planter, a man of colour and a native of Africa legislating together in one colonial assembly. White reads the timing closely. The French law of 4 April 1792 had just granted political rights to free men of colour, which white colonists were obstructing, so the picture endorsed that law, and by seating an African in the chamber it anticipated by nearly two years the decision to free the enslaved and make black men citizens. The plan appeared in Benjamin Banneker's almanac.

Yingling uses the border as his instrument for reading the whole island, and this crossing is his sharpest illustration. In March 1791 the French governor of Saint-Domingue took refuge in Santo Domingo from white crowds in Port-au-Prince stirred up by the revolution in France. The route he used was the one already worn by maroons, merchants, cattle herders, exiles and families, and it had just been used by the free coloured dissidents he had helped condemn. The colony had been coming apart since 1789: elected assemblies and militias had undermined the governor's authority, the Colonial Assembly of Saint-Marc had drafted a constitution rebuffing metropolitan oversight and flirting with independence, and petits blancs in Port-au-Prince confronted him with demands modelled on the sans-culottes. Spanish observers concluded the French colony was already lost.