Paris grants political equality to free men of colour to save property

On 4 April 1792 the National Assembly declared that men of colour and free Black men must enjoy equality of political rights alongside white colonists, allowing them to vote in local elections and hold any post if they met the financial criteria for active citizenship. Dubois insists on how the law justified itself. It was presented as a response to the uprising of the enslaved, and stated that the unity of citizens was the only thing that could preserve their property from pillage and fire. The odious conspiracy of counterrevolutionary planters was named as part of the problem. He credits the victory to the increasingly radical tone of the revolution in France and the looming prospect of war with Britain, but insists it was driven by events in Saint-Domingue and modelled on the concordats already signed there between whites and free coloureds.

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.

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.

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.