A Les Cayes prison list sorts the free into citizens and Africans

Fick's most striking evidence is administrative. Sampling the Les Cayes prison lists from late 1793 into 1794, when emancipated workers and soldiers alike were regularly jailed for resisting the conditions placed on their freedom, she finds two categories of new citizen. On a single day, 24 November 1793, the register enters Citizen Mustapha, Citizen Basch of the Berwick regiment and Citizen Fidel, followed by Rosali, africaine. The pattern holds for months. Arrested whites are invariably citoyen; members of the Black militia and national guard usually are; people with no trade, rank or occupation, who would almost all be field labourers, are systematically africain. Fick reads this as the pre-abolition occupational hierarchy reappearing inside universal citizenship, with property or occupational standing determining who counted. A delegation sent to the South in 1796 formally banned the usage, probably without effect. Where this account departs from the standard one: Shows that the 4 February 1794 grant of universal citizenship left a working distinction between citoyen and africain in place on the ground.

On 31 December 1792 the Nantes house of Chaurand ruled off the accounts of eight fully documented slaving voyages. After the initial payments they had expected 2.8 million livres from buyers in the French Caribbean. They were credited with 2.3 million, about eighty two per cent of it. Holding back a slice of the price had become ordinary practice among colonial buyers, and roughly a tenth of the money owed was never handed over at all. Across the port as a whole, people in the colonies owed the Nantes traders something like 45 million livres arising from the previous decade of slaving alone, divided between deliveries still under way, deliveries of the last three years and older debts. That is close to three quarters of the 63 million livres the Nantes houses afterwards recorded as lost through the Haitian Revolution. Rather than put fresh money into the islands the traders began taking over the management and then the ownership of plantations that could not pay them.

Dubois tracks how the ceremony entered the record, and the chain is short and compromised. Antoine Dalmas was the only person who wrote about Bois-Caiman at the time. He had served as a surgeon on the Gallifet plantation, survived the insurrection on the northern plain and fled into exile in the United States, where in 1793 and 1794 he wrote a memoir describing how, before carrying out the plan made at the 14 August meeting, the conspirators held a kind of celebration or sacrifice involving a black pig surrounded by fetishes and strange offerings. He presented it as the ultimate expression of African barbarism. Dubois notes that the earliest written version of the speech comes from Herard Dumesle and did not attribute it to Boukman, and that an oath appears only in an account recorded a decade later and used by Ardouin. Where this account departs from the standard one: Shows that the speech now universally attributed to Boukman was neither recorded at the time nor originally credited to him.

In 1794 the people of Philadelphia raised fourteen thousand dollars for refugees from Saint Domingue. Thirteen thousand of it paid to send white refugees back to the island. Another four thousand was collected to buy passages to France, and more went to widows of men who had died in the colony. Black refugees were given no relief by the French authorities, by the government of George Washington or by the private donors. At that moment Absalom Jones and Richard Allen were collecting small sums to build the African Church of Philadelphia, which became the first black church erected in the United States. White philanthropy turned toward the fleeing colonists and the church fund stalled. Its organisers had spent two years gathering three thousand five hundred dollars. Twelve thousand was raised in a few days for slaveholders who had just lost the labour of the people they owned.