Rebels claimed a king had freed them, not the rights of man

Testing the claim that revolutionary ideology drove the risings, Geggus reports that insurgents in the French Caribbean seldom spoke of rights. They said instead that they had already been freed, by the king in Martinique and Saint-Domingue, or by the National Assembly in Guadeloupe. The leaders in the north of Saint-Domingue, Louverture among them, paired conspicuous royalist language with negotiable demands about how many people should actually be liberated, a posture that lasted until the commissioner Sonthonax abolished slavery there in August 1793. Documented uses of the phrase rights of man by enslaved rebels are scarce, and Geggus states that much of the supposed evidence rests on a text that is almost certainly forged. His conclusion is that abolitionist rumour, the belief that a distant government had granted freedom and that local officials were hiding it, moved people far more reliably than abstract doctrine did. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus holds that the celebrated link between rebel slaves and the rights of man rests in large part on a document he considers a forgery.

On his expedition along the Niger river in 1793 and 1794, Mungo Park reported Mande speakers using amulets made from animal horns filled with saphoes, papers carrying passages from the Koran. In Senegambia, Muslims and others alike had long gone to itinerant scholars for pieces of Arabic writing to put inside protective pouches, and the Portuguese called these bolsas de mandinga. John Matthews, a Royal Navy lieutenant in Sierra Leone in the 1780s, found the same practice further south, powders and scraps of Koranic text in small bags, and recorded that people wore several at once, each against a separate misfortune: one to preserve the wearer from shot, one from poison, one from fire, one from drowning. The bags crossed the Atlantic with the people who wore them. In Bahia the Lisbon Inquisition prosecuted their possession, and men wore them into battle in Jamaica in 1760 and in Bahia in 1835.

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.

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.