The rising was timed for the day the Assembly would be sitting

Dubois recovers the original target date and with it the scale of the conspirators' ambition. A full meeting of the Colonial Assembly was scheduled at Le Cap for 25 August 1791. That day would have found the population of Le Cap distracted by the occasion and would have offered a unique chance to eliminate the colony's entire political elite at once. The timing also suited the practical constraints: the rising was set for a moment when men could move without arousing suspicion and would not have to fight after a long day in the fields. The plan was overtaken by events. In the week after the 14 August meeting some people could not contain themselves. On the sixteenth, arsonists were caught on a Limbe estate, and one told the owner that drivers, coachmen, domestics and trusted workers had formed a plot.

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 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.

Geggus tracks the speed of the news rather than its influence. By September 1791 enslaved people in Jamaica were singing songs about the events in the neighbouring French colony, and blacks in Havana were believed to be sacrificing pigs in honour of the insurgents. When Louverture occupied Spanish Santo Domingo in early 1801 the enslaved in the hills above Coro in western Venezuela were praising him in song within weeks. A year after independence, alleged conspirators in Trinidad were reported to be parodying the mass with words about eating white men's flesh and remembering Saint-Domingue. He also corrects a widely repeated quotation about black power dissolving white authority, which has been dated to a visit to Rio in 1792 but actually comes from 1806 and refers to the whole hemisphere.