Emancipation is decreed in 1793 but not inside British lines

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.

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.

The clearest demonstration of Girard's thesis is the Saint Lucia expedition of June 1795. Victor Hugues sent about three hundred men from Guadeloupe against twenty four hundred well equipped British soldiers. They carried the promise of freedom, drew heavy support from the enslaved population, fought as guerillas and took the island. The naming of the resulting force is itself part of the history. British reports called the men who joined brigands, the word normally used for maroons, while French accounts called them the French army of the woods. Hugues ran the same play elsewhere, using the black Caribs of Saint Vincent, sponsoring a large rising in Grenada across 1795 and 1796, and drawing up smaller schemes against Saint Christopher and Curacao. Girard notes that several of these islands had been French within living memory and still held French speaking populations, so the campaign for black freedom doubled as a bid to recover lost territory.

In the middle of June 1798 four vessels from Saint Domingue reached Philadelphia. Governor Thomas Mifflin forbade the landing of any of the black passengers aboard them and asked President John Adams for authority to stop such landings in neighbouring states and to keep their owners out of Pennsylvania altogether. The fear behind the order had been building for years. Enslaved people had set a series of fires in Albany in November 1793, the practice was said to have spread, night patrols in Philadelphia were increased, and a fire broke out in the city on 4 January 1797. White Philadelphians had come to speak of black insurrection as an infection that ships could carry. The standoff ended when letters from the white colonists on board assured the city that only fifty five enslaved people were with them and that none had ever carried arms.