Abolition arrives as a bid to outbid Spain for the insurgents

Between August and October 1793 Sonthonax abolished slavery across the colony in a desperate attempt to preserve it for France. Contemporaries described the effect as an electric shock. Surrendering to the same mixture of pragmatism and libertarian principle, the National Convention in Paris ratified his proclamation in February 1794 and extended it to every French colony, declaring all former slaves citizens. Geggus counts the consequences precisely. Emancipation became an instrument of war to be exported to enemy colonies, it was the furthest point the French Revolution reached, and it liberated about a fifth of all the enslaved people in the Americas, more than six hundred thousand human beings. The white population of the colony was eclipsed in the process, with thousands fleeing and many of those who stayed dying in successive massacres, while radicalised free people of colour allied to republican officials held much of the territory.

With almost no navy in the region, the Convention fell back in January 1793 on licensing privateers. Girard reports the results as a bargain for the Republic, with corsairs operating out of Guadeloupe alone taking about eighteen hundred prizes between 1794 and 1798 at minimal cost to the treasury. The practice also advertised the regime's principles, since many crews included black sailors and at least fifteen captains are known to have been black. He sets against this the British counterpoint. The Royal Navy made a policy of selling captured black privateers into slavery and operated under the punitive Articles of War of 1749. The contrast is the mechanism of the whole article in miniature. The side that offered freedom recruited from the majority population, and the side that offered sale into bondage had to import and bury its own men.

Geggus closes his study with an episode from August 1791, about a week before the revolt broke out across the plain. Fire had been started in several cane pieces at Haut-du-Cap, and the slaves rallied round Toussaint and the driver Bruno to put it out. With the manager absent, they then cut and processed the cane on their own initiative before it could spoil. When the general uprising began, the same anonymous source, probably Bayon de Libertat, reports that the Haut-du-Cap workforce did not join in but stayed on the estate, though Geggus adds that they may have had little choice once the place became a military camp. Two years later, after Le Cap burned and slavery was abolished, the same people offered at Toussaint's urging to provide for the ruined attorney's family.

Yellow fever killed three thousand five hundred or more people in Philadelphia in 1797. Most physicians who could leave the city did leave. One who stayed was Felix Pascalis, who had arrived in the United States in 1793 as a refugee from the Caribbean and had treated fever patients at Benjamin Rush's house on Walnut Street during the epidemic of that year. His book on the 1797 outbreak argued against the common opinion that the disease had been carried in on human bodies aboard ships from Saint-Domingue. He allowed that ships brought it, and held that it moved through wood and air rather than from person to person, rising as putrid exhalations from the timber wharves along the city's two rivers as they dried out. His recommendation was to replace the wharves with stone and coat the stone with tar once a year. The theory was wrong. The habit of plotting cases against places became part of epidemiology.