Raimond's memoir blames colour prejudice for every colonial crisis

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.

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.

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.