Three days into the rising the planters write to Jamaica

Beard prints the letter the newly opened Colonial Assembly sent from Cap Francais on 24 August 1791 to the governor of Jamaica. It describes fire wasting their possessions, the hands of their slaves already stained with the blood of their brethren, and asks for very prompt assistance for men now shut up inside the towns. The mechanism is a choice of loyalties. Rather than apply to France, whose revolutionary legislature had just enfranchised their free coloured rivals, the planters looked to Britain. Beard notes that without waiting for a reply the assembly dressed its troops in the English round hat and replaced the French national colours with a black cockade. He treats this as an act of rebellion by the slave owners themselves, which weakened any later claim that the insurgents were the only party in revolt.

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.

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.

On 19 May 1791 the ship Charming Sally tied up at Philadelphia and fifteen people from Saint Domingue came ashore. Five more ships over the following six weeks carried thirty nine others. Eight more between July and December brought eighty two. The traffic then changed character. Nine vessels reached the city in March and April 1792 with thirty seven passengers, sixteen ships in May with one hundred and seventy nine, and another two hundred and forty four people landed between June and August. Over the next thirty months more than three thousand people who had left the French colony entered Philadelphia. The city was then the seat of the national government and the busiest American port for coffee grown on the island, so the news and the people arrived together. Pennsylvania had passed gradual abolition laws in 1780 and 1788 that freed anyone brought into the state and held for six months by an owner settling there, which made the arrival of slaveholders a legal problem from the first week.