Toussaint signs his first surviving letter at nearly fifty

Girard establishes that the most famous revolutionary in the Atlantic world was illiterate for most of his life and learned to write late. Born around 1743, Toussaint signed none of the civil or notarial documents concerning him before the revolution, not even after his emancipation in the 1770s, and Girard notes only one possible exception, a signature at the foot of a burial record for his eldest son in 1785. Some authors credit his godfather Pierre-Baptiste, a free Black man educated by a Jesuit, with teaching him. The first letter unquestionably signed by his own hand dates from the end of 1791, a joint letter of Jean-Francois, Biassou and others to the civil commissioners, when he was close to fifty. Everything issued in his name afterwards was almost always drafted by secretaries in polished bureaucratic French.

David Geggus worked through seventy five surviving plantation inventories from Saint Domingue, covering roughly fifteen thousand enslaved people and recording ethnicity, age and sex. Among the African born on sugar estates, the group the records call Congos was the largest in all three regions of the colony. They were 43.5 per cent in the North between 1777 and 1791, 36.3 per cent in the South between 1771 and 1791, and 32.4 per cent in the West between 1773 and 1791. The North was where the rising of 1791 began. The label needs care. John Thornton warns that Congo was used loosely and served the French and the colonial upper class as a term of contempt for the African born. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall notes that the same people were recorded as Congos in French and Spanish colonies and as Angolans in British ones.

Dubois handles the most contested night in Haitian history as a problem of evidence. Boukman, who had worked as a driver and then a coachman, was the most visible leader of the first days and was, it is believed, a religious leader, which would have earned him wide respect. Before the revolt he led conspirators in a ceremony in the woods at a place called Bois-Caiman, officiating alongside either an old African woman described as having strange eyes and bristling hair or a green-eyed woman of African and Corsican descent named Cecile Fatiman. Although the service is usually placed just after the meeting of 14 August, Dubois argues it probably took place on the following Sunday, 21 August, at a plantation halfway between Gallifet and Le Cap, which made it a convenient gathering point. Participants swore secrecy and vengeance over the blood of a black pig. Where this account departs from the standard one: Redates the ceremony to 21 August 1791, against the usual placement immediately after the 14 August meeting that other works in this batch adopt.

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.