The rebels rose when the colony had just shipped out its soldiers

Geggus finds the clearest revolutionary effect not in ideas but in the collapse of the machinery of control. The northern plain insurgents rose at a moment that coincided with the start of open fighting between whites and free people of colour and came shortly after half of the colonial garrison had been shipped away. They then worked the split between white radicals and white conservatives to their advantage, as insurgents in Guadeloupe did in 1793 and as the enslaved in Dutch Demerara did in 1795 by fighting both the pro French and anti French factions in the ruling class. He treats the pattern as general. Many risings of the period followed a recent fall in local troop strength, including the three great British Caribbean revolts of 1816, 1823 and 1831, and the Aponte conspiracy in Cuba, which was launched when garrison numbers on the island were low.

On 14 August 1791 Boukman gathered the conspirators at Bois Caiman, on the Lenormand de Mezy plantation, and made them swear loyalty before the rising. The ceremony was a blood oath. Under the branches of a mapou, with lightning crossing the sky and thunder over the silent assembly, a priestess made her signs and drove the sacrificial knife into the throat of a wild pig, then spread the entrails on ground flooded with blood. Boukman spoke the words in Creole. The good God who makes the sun, who lifts the sea and makes the storm rumble, is hidden in the cloud and sees everything the whites do. The god of the whites commands crime; ours asks for kindness and orders us to take vengeance. Throw away the image of the white god who thirsts for the water in our eyes, and listen to the liberty that speaks in all our hearts. Thirteen years of war followed, ending in the black state of 1804.

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.

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.