France offers freedom to any insurgent who will fight for the Republic

Fick reconstructs emancipation as a sequence of recruiting measures rather than a single act of principle. With the north-east under Spanish control, a British invasion expected and the northern capital in chaos after rioting and arson destroyed nearly two thirds of Le Cap, the commissioners turned to the African fighters and to the eight to ten thousand enslaved townspeople for the military support they needed. On 21 June 1793 they proclaimed freedom for all rebel Black warriors who would fight for the Republic against its internal and external enemies. On 2 July the procedure followed: rebels had one week to present themselves to the appropriate authorities for enlistment, after which they would be free citizens. The text also spoke of others whom the commissioners would still raise to the dignity of free men, signalling that wider measures were coming.

Raimond's memoir on the causes of the troubles and disasters of the colony named the colour prejudice instituted by white colonists as the principal cause of every political crisis Saint-Domingue had experienced. The essay treats it as the earliest Haitian memoir of the revolution, delivered first as a speech in 1791, and pairs it with General Rigaud's memoir of 1797 refuting the calumnies against citizens of colour. Both marshal letters, newspaper articles and printed matter of every kind, but rest their claim to truth on lived experience and on personal protest, which the essay identifies as the characteristic evidentiary move of the genre. Both also apologise for the limits of the form, Rigaud saying his memoir may perhaps expose someone and Raimond saying he will try to paint without passion or partiality, while insisting the facts will emerge regardless.

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.

In 1792 Benjamin Rush drafted a plan for a peace office in the federal government and specified its decoration, including ploughshares beaten from swords and five life sized paintings. Four showed enemies reconciled, a Native American and a Kentucky settler cooking venison in one pot, Cornwallis and Tipu Sultan sharing a decanter of Madeira, French and Austrian soldiers dancing arm in arm. The fifth proposed a Saint-Domingue planter, a man of colour and a native of Africa legislating together in one colonial assembly. White reads the timing closely. The French law of 4 April 1792 had just granted political rights to free men of colour, which white colonists were obstructing, so the picture endorsed that law, and by seating an African in the chamber it anticipated by nearly two years the decision to free the enslaved and make black men citizens. The plan appeared in Benjamin Banneker's almanac.