Polverel opens registers for owners to free people voluntarily

Fick follows Polverel's slower and more legalistic route to abolition in the West. Two days before Sonthonax acted, and unaware of it, he had freed the enslaved on sequestered estates belonging to emigres and deportees, arguing that since those plantations belonged to enemies of the Republic, confiscating and reallocating them violated no owner's rights. Nearly half the enslaved of the West were emancipated by that measure, but people remained enslaved wherever owners were present. Without attacking their property rights, Polverel urged those owners to free their people voluntarily and on 22 September 1793, marking the first anniversary of the French Republic, opened public registers for them to do so. Fick reads this as an attempt to fuse emancipation and citizenship with republican principle. The death on 27 September of the South's commissioner Olivier Delpech, firmly opposed to general emancipation, settled the question.

On 31 December 1792 the Nantes house of Chaurand ruled off the accounts of eight fully documented slaving voyages. After the initial payments they had expected 2.8 million livres from buyers in the French Caribbean. They were credited with 2.3 million, about eighty two per cent of it. Holding back a slice of the price had become ordinary practice among colonial buyers, and roughly a tenth of the money owed was never handed over at all. Across the port as a whole, people in the colonies owed the Nantes traders something like 45 million livres arising from the previous decade of slaving alone, divided between deliveries still under way, deliveries of the last three years and older debts. That is close to three quarters of the 63 million livres the Nantes houses afterwards recorded as lost through the Haitian Revolution. Rather than put fresh money into the islands the traders began taking over the management and then the ownership of plantations that could not pay them.

Dubois tracks how the ceremony entered the record, and the chain is short and compromised. Antoine Dalmas was the only person who wrote about Bois-Caiman at the time. He had served as a surgeon on the Gallifet plantation, survived the insurrection on the northern plain and fled into exile in the United States, where in 1793 and 1794 he wrote a memoir describing how, before carrying out the plan made at the 14 August meeting, the conspirators held a kind of celebration or sacrifice involving a black pig surrounded by fetishes and strange offerings. He presented it as the ultimate expression of African barbarism. Dubois notes that the earliest written version of the speech comes from Herard Dumesle and did not attribute it to Boukman, and that an oath appears only in an account recorded a decade later and used by Ardouin. Where this account departs from the standard one: Shows that the speech now universally attributed to Boukman was neither recorded at the time nor originally credited to him.

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.