A priest rides out and Jean-Francois refuses the French on his knees

Months after the largest and best organised group of self-liberated insurgents formally became the Black Auxiliaries of Carlos IV, Jean-Francois received a fresh French recruitment offer. The reversal was abrupt, since the French had recently refused to negotiate at all, and the new commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel had just begun selectively recognising the freedom of Black fighters willing to defend them near Cap-Francais. Jose Vazquez, a mulato priest from Santo Domingo who had become Jean-Francois's close adviser and his channel to Spanish officials, learned the general's loyalty might be in play and rode out to confront him. Jean-Francois knelt, swore obedience before God and the Spanish king, handed over the letter unopened, and then showed Vazquez his plans for expanding Spanish conquests. Yingling uses the scene to show religion functioning as the actual mechanism of alliance.

The wars that began with the rising of August 1791 broke the plantation economy of Saint-Domingue by destroying the two things it ran on, forced labour and fixed capital. The export figures show the scale. Measured against their levels of 1789, in 1795 sugar exports stood at 1.2 percent, coffee at 2.8 percent, cotton at 0.7 percent and indigo at 0.5 percent. All four except indigo recovered strongly up to 1802, and then the French invasion of that year pushed them down again, leaving 1804 with sugar at 34 percent, coffee at 40, cotton at 43 and indigo at 4 percent of pre revolutionary levels. Reports from 1803 describe burned cities, demolished sugar mills, carbonised beams and plantations reduced to ash, with only the small plots of coffee and food crops showing any life. The population fell from 520,000 in 1790 to 380,000 in 1805.

Reviewing John Garrigus's study of Saint-Domingue's free people of colour, Geggus singles out the parish of Aquin for anticipating post-independence changes in the late 1790s by selling off plantation land in peasant-sized units. He notes that Garrigus's socioeconomic base is nine thousand notarial documents, mostly from three of the colony's fifty-two parishes on the south coast, which lets him measure the rapid ascent of the free coloured elite in the last decades of the old regime. Two findings cut against current assumptions. Modern historians have exaggerated the wealth of the group, which was not made up of the men of immense capital C. L. R. James imagined. And although recent scholarship has popularised a special connection between people of colour and coffee, Garrigus finds indigo and cotton were the main sources of wealth for the people he studied. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus endorses Garrigus's demonstration that the wealth of Saint-Domingue's free coloured elite has been overstated since C. L. R. James, and his scepticism about the recently popular idea that the free coloured population contained a military leadership class.

Pierrot dates the first mention of Toussaint in British documents to October 1793, when troops entering the port of Gonaives found a black man commanding the place whom they called the Spanish general and whose name they wrote as Tusan. The mechanism the article traces begins here. British writing about Saint Domingue consistently detached the man from his circumstances, and the detachment started with the simple failure to place him in any command structure. When the Times of London first named him on 7 November 1794 it printed his name in capitals, described him as a former slave commanding a division under Laveaux, and misspelt the first element in a way that turned a name charged with religious meaning into a variant of the French word for powerful. The capitals overpowered the allegiance and typographically isolated him from the French.