Toussaint's own language buries the pan-African reading of his career

Girard's conclusion turns a linguistic profile into a political verdict. Born to Arada parents in a French Caribbean colony, Toussaint lived at the intersection of African, American and European worlds but did not weigh them equally. By pushing Ewe-Fon into the background, Girard argues, he buries pan-African interpretations of his career. Unlike the autonomist planters of the eighteenth century or Haitian nationalists today, he did not use Kreyol to assert creole pride, which cuts against readings of him as a proto-independentist. The language he preferred in writing, and often in speech, was the one he associated with social advancement: French, the language of a colonial system he never got out of. Girard characterises his French as laborious and almost ashamed, the French of a provincial arriving in the capital full of ambition and trying to hide his accent. Where this account departs from the standard one: Argues against both the pan-African and the proto-independentist readings of Toussaint, on the evidence of his linguistic choices rather than his politics.

Dubois shows the May 1791 decree working on the ground before it worked in Paris. Faced with radical whites in Port-au-Prince, many of them petits blancs, and determined to prevent a slave rising in his region, a commander made peace with the free coloureds instead. He led the administrators of Croix-des-Bouquets and Mirebalais in signing an agreement with the Confederates promising to abide by the decrees of the National Assembly, including that of 15 May 1791 which had given political rights to some free coloureds. That agreement became the template for another signed shortly afterwards between representatives of Port-au-Prince and the men who pointedly called themselves citizens of colour. Their text opened with a history lesson, arguing that provisions passed in their favour in the 1685 Code Noir had been violated by the advance of a ridiculous prejudice.

About fifty enslaved people of the De Knip plantation refused to work in apparent protest at a specific infringement of the usual daily routines, and marched off to neighbouring estates. Within two days some two thousand of the island's twelve thousand enslaved inhabitants were in revolt and had won their first engagements against the white, coloured and black militias. Oostindie is careful about causes. A Dutch and Spanish treaty had effectively closed the escape route to Coro, which may have added to the ferment, and there may have been another drought and food shortage, but the archives do not let him decide whether the revolt was a conspiracy from the start or grew spontaneously. Negotiations in late August failed, and one of the leaders had taken the name Toussaint.

Renda separates the two events that other accounts fuse. She states that secret services in the woods of the north nurtured the will to rebel through the summer of 1791, that one such service is said to have taken place on 14 August led by a priest named Boukman and a priestess whose name is not known, and that those present swore an oath of solidarity to revolt. A week later, on the night of 22 August, the enslaved people of the northern plains burned the cane and turned on their owners. She uses the conch shell as her thread. It calls people across distance, summons work gangs, ends the working day and opens a religious service, and marines on patrol more than a century later were badly unnerved by the sound of conches and drums coming out of the hills around them without knowing why. Where this account departs from the standard one: Renda dates the Bois Caiman oath to 14 August 1791 and the rising to 22 August, splitting into two events what many accounts place on a single night.