Toussaint's first certain signature comes months into the revolt

Most accounts have Toussaint literate while still enslaved, taught by his godfather, self taught, or educated on a hypothetical trip to France. The authors point out that he signed none of the baptismal or notarial documents that survive from before the revolution. His son Isaac said a French officer taught him to read and write after the rising began, and the first signature certainly his belongs to this month. The signature grew more elaborate through the decade, he wrote some letters in his own hand while his spelling stayed uncertain, he was self conscious about the gap in his schooling, and secretaries drafted most official correspondence. By 1802 he could compose a long and forceful petition to Bonaparte in French. The article treats the revolution as the moment when gifted men of the colony stepped out of plantation registers and became authors in their own right. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against the common claim that Toussaint read Raynal as a slave, the article argues he was probably illiterate until several months after the revolt began.

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.

Mocombe dates the rising itself to the twenty-second, writing that the black population of the north entered into rebellion, killing the whites and mulattoes they encountered and setting the colony's plantations alight. The eight day gap between the ceremony and the rising is deliberate in his account, since it makes the oath an act of organisation with named leaders rather than a spontaneous outburst. He lists the men the priestess had designated as commanders, including Biassou, Jeannot Bullet, Boukman Dutty, Jean Francois and Macaya. The rising took place while the whites and the free people of colour were still fighting each other over participation in colonial government and over equality of opportunity, which for Mocombe is the point: the two struggles were different in kind, and the maroons entered a war that the others had already begun for different reasons.

In the same year that he imagined an integrated colonial legislature, Rush told the American Philosophical Society that the colour of African skin was the result of a kind of leprosy. The consequence he drew was that if physicians found a cure, Africans would turn white, the racial justification for slavery and disenfranchisement would disappear, and the formerly enslaved, restored to what he considered their true condition, would be fit for American citizenship. Meanwhile he advised against unions across the colour line for fear of spreading the supposed disease. White declines to call this simple hypocrisy. Rush kept both positions through the 1790s, reprinting the peace office proposal in 1798 while continuing to argue for a medical origin of blackness. The case shows that images let him picture an end to racial violence that his own prose could not support, and it shows whiteness being reasserted as the precondition of political rights.