The same year, Rush tells a learned society blackness is a disease

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.

In 1791 free people of colour in Saint-Domingue armed enslaved men to strengthen their hand against the white colonists who refused them equal rights. The armed men were known as the Swiss, a name borrowed from the mercenary guards of the French king. Once the free coloured leaders obtained the concessions they wanted, the soldiers who had fought for them became an embarrassment. Two hundred and seventeen of them were put aboard ship late that year and carried to the Mosquito Coast of Central America. They were held below deck in irons, and the crews tried to sell them on arrival. Officials at Belize and in Jamaica, worried about what such men might say to the enslaved people around them, refused to let them land. The ships turned back to Saint-Domingue, where the men appear to have been killed without trial. Political exile, sale and massacre ran together in a single voyage, eleven years before the same combination returned on a much larger scale.

The military deadlock lasted two years. The insurgents could not take the fortified towns or link up with the smaller risings that flared briefly in the west and south. France sent twelve thousand soldiers in 1792, and although they won engagements in open country they had no answer to an enemy that would not stand and fight. Nearly two thirds of those soldiers died of tropical fevers within a year of arriving, a pattern Geggus says repeated throughout the revolution. The Spanish border made the problem worse. Madrid declared neutrality, so the French could never attack the rebels from every side, and people in Spanish Santo Domingo traded ammunition for plantation loot with the insurgents, having little sympathy for their rich and irreligious French neighbours. The governor there feared a black invasion and so placated the rebels without helping them, while official policy was aid to white refugees only.

On 10 May 1795 Jose Caridad Gonzalez, an African from the Loango coast, joined Jose Leonardo Chirino in leading a rising of enslaved and free Black people in the Coro district of Venezuela. It was not the first of its kind there. A rebellion around Caracas in 1749 was led by a man remembered as Miguel Loango. Central Africans shipped through Loango made up a large part of the enslaved population of Maracaibo, Caracas, the state of Falcon and the Barlovento district of Miranda. The coastal town of Curiepe, founded in the seventeenth century by two men called Manuel and Antonio Congo, was the first settlement of free Black people in the country. The demands raised in 1795 were taken up two years later by Manuel Gual and Jose Maria Espana, whose conspiracy Venezuela treats as a founding act. The port that filled Saint-Domingue filled Venezuela as well, and risings followed in both places.