Galbaud lands at the Cape to take a command he is refused

General Galbaud disembarked at Cap Francais on 6 May 1793 and set about assuming executive power. Beard explains why this could not work. The civil commission already in the colony, victorious in the west and the south, had been systematically replacing white commanders with men of colour, and it regarded Galbaud as a threat to that policy. On 7 June the commissioners came back to the Cape with a detachment of freedmen under Chanlatte and ordered him to re-embark. He obeyed, but his brother stayed ashore and agitated the townspeople. Twelve hundred prisoners held in the ships in the harbour broke their chains and landed, gathering support as they marched on the government house. Beard uses the resulting street battle to make his central argument, that whites destroying each other stripped away the prestige that had held the enslaved in awe.

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.

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.

More than fifty French ships reached Baltimore carrying thousands of destitute refugees from Cap Français, which had burned in June. The passengers came ashore with nothing. Newspapers had been reporting the revolt in Saint Domingue for two years, and readers could believe or discount those reports as they chose; a wharf crowded with ruined planters and their households was a fact standing in the street. Newport Bowers, born free and black in Massachusetts, was working on the wharves that day and watched them come ashore. Everyone around him had fled the colony. Bowers decided to go and look at it, and made his way to the Cap. Scott uses him to make a point about the direction of travel. Black North Americans were active participants in the news of the revolution, and some of them went to see it, worked in its ports, and carried what they learned back into American harbours where other black sailors and labourers were waiting to hear.