Sonthonax abolishes slavery to outbid Spain and hold the colony

Geggus sets out the emancipation proclamation as the product of three developments that were each necessary and none sufficient. There was an undefeated slave insurrection in the north, which Sonthonax had stopped trying to beat as early as February. There was war among the colonial powers, breaking out over February and March of 1793, which killed any prospect of reinforcement from France and brought Spanish invasion in late June and British in September. And there was the accidental presence of a radical with a concealed abolitionist background in charge of the colony. Both France and Spain had decided to recruit insurgent slaves as soldiers and it was the Spanish who succeeded, offering freedom, land, guns, uniforms and cash. Geggus argues that without the likelihood of losing Saint-Domingue the twenty-eight-year-old commissar would not have dared act on his convictions.

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.

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.