A mulatto general frees the man who will crown himself emperor

Brandon opens the life with a fact she treats as decisive for everything that follows. Soulouque had been enslaved since 1789 and was freed by the mulatto general Andre Rigaud in 1793. The detail matters to her argument because Soulouque would spend his presidency and his empire in conflict with the class Rigaud represented, and because he came to power with no schooling at all. Brandon says he could write only his name and made up for it by watching other men closely, which allowed him to surprise those who had written him off. The article uses the point to rebut the standard portrait, quoted from a contemporary study, of an illiterate and superstitious general with no public record and no following. In her reading the underestimation was the mistake, and the ministers who chose him made it.

Most of the colony's black population had been freed officially only by the commissioner's emancipation decree of 1793, which a law of 1794 and the French constitution of 1795 then confirmed. Girard adds the qualification that changes the map. In the western and southern districts under English occupation at the time, slavery simply continued until 1798. Emancipation was therefore not a single event but a patchwork with a five year gap, and the people who lived through that gap were exactly the population of Rigaud's south. Girard uses the point to explain why the 1801 constitution had to enshrine emancipation preemptively. Bonaparte's constitution of 1799 had vaguely provided that colonies would be governed by separate laws, which implied that colonial subjects were not full citizens and that slavery might one day return.

Writing to the naval minister on 25 March 1795, the French representative Etienne Laveaux gave figures that explain why emancipation was not optional. Of 10,288 soldiers sent to Saint-Domingue only 990 remained, and of 952 officers only 262. Yellow fever and malaria, not battle, did most of this. Girard notes a French officer's earlier estimate that four white men had to be sent for one to be alive four years later. Former slaves, numbering more than half a million in Saint-Domingue at the start of the revolution and far more resistant to tropical fevers, became the replacement. Regulations required black civilians to keep working on estates even after abolition, so joining the army was a way out of field labour, and the constitution of 1795 reserved the vote to soldiers and the wealthy. By 1796 a third of the officers and seven eighths of the soldiers in Guadeloupe were black.

Speaking to the African Masonic Lodge in Boston, Prince Hall, who had fought in the war against Britain, told his brethren not to be cast down under the abuses they laboured under, because the darkest hour comes before daybreak. He asked them to remember how dark a day it had been for their African brethren six years earlier in the French West Indies, when nothing but the snap of the whip was heard from morning to evening. Jackson uses the speech to open a two century argument. Black and white Americans took opposite meanings from the same events, with white reaction running to shock, fear, surveillance and harsh law, while black Americans saw in Haiti and in the figure of Toussaint the possibilities of their race and its movement toward freedom.