Commissioners abolish slavery to outbid Spanish recruiters

The chapter identifies a conjuncture of three developments. The most immediate was military desperation: Britain and Spain had entered the war, Spain had recruited most of the insurgent slaves with offers of freedom for themselves and their families, and war with England meant France could no longer safely ship troops across the Atlantic. The second was ideological, since Sonthonax had been one of the few French radicals to express abolitionist views early and knew abolitionism was gaining ground at home, even though he had no authority to end slavery. The third was the undefeated insurrection itself. Having imposed racial equality the previous autumn, closed the colonial assembly and assumed dictatorial powers, the commissioners first offered terms to the insurgents and then abolished slavery throughout the colony. Very few insurgents rallied to them at first. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against readings that credit the insurgents with a programme of general emancipation, the chapter argues that Jean-Francois and Biassou twice negotiated terms returning most followers to slavery, sold women and children to their Spanish allies, and refused to join the Republic after it adopted freedom for all.

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.

Francois Furet and Denis Richet refused the description of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution and called it a liberal one instead. Their reading needed a date on which the liberal revolution left its course, and they chose 10 August 1792, the day the Paris sections and the federes stormed the Tuileries and brought down the monarchy. From that morning, in their account, the revolution swerved towards the Terror, which they treat as a brief parenthesis running against a much longer liberal current that spans 1750 to 1850. What pushed it off course, they say, was the patriotic fervour of the crowd. Albert Soboul answered that the crowd drove the revolution and supplied whatever force it had. The argument matters beyond France. Historians read the French Revolution as a commentary on the Russian one, and the dates they pick are chosen with the twentieth century in view.

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.