Macaya sacks Le Cap for the republic, then swears to Spain

Having sacked Cap Français at the request of the republican commissioners, the leader known as Macaya pulled back into the hills and gave his oath to Spain's king, a monarch who had been supplying the rebellion for some time. When the commissioner Étienne Polverel tried to bring him back, Macaya answered that he was subject to three kings, of Congo who was master of all the blacks, of France who represented his father and of Spain who represented his mother, and that these three were descendants of those who came led by a star to adore God made man. Thornton builds the whole article on that reply. The order matters: Kongo comes first. He argues Macaya's authority probably rested on his standing in the Kongolese national organisation rather than any position in the plantation hierarchy, and that his following was large. Where this account departs from the standard one: Thornton reads Macaya's royalism as a coherent political position drawn from Kongolese constitutional argument rather than, as Thomas Madiou and later historians assumed, evidence that the rebels were inveterate and backward-looking royalists.

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.

Pierrot dates the first mention of Toussaint in British documents to October 1793, when troops entering the port of Gonaives found a black man commanding the place whom they called the Spanish general and whose name they wrote as Tusan. The mechanism the article traces begins here. British writing about Saint Domingue consistently detached the man from his circumstances, and the detachment started with the simple failure to place him in any command structure. When the Times of London first named him on 7 November 1794 it printed his name in capitals, described him as a former slave commanding a division under Laveaux, and misspelt the first element in a way that turned a name charged with religious meaning into a variant of the French word for powerful. The capitals overpowered the allegiance and typographically isolated him from the French.