Sonthonax and Polverel try to crush the revolt by land and sea

On 12 April 1793 Sonthonax and Polverel, operating from their base at Saint Marc, launched a combined land and naval assault meant to subdue the revolt. Bell treats the attempt as the last serious effort to restore the colony by force with the troops actually available. The mechanism of its failure was arithmetic. The Republic could not ship enough men across an Atlantic patrolled by the British, the white colonial militia was politically unreliable and increasingly royalist, and the insurgent forces held terrain they knew. Within two months the commissioners were fighting Galbaud in the streets of the Cape and freeing prisoners to do it. Bell's sequence makes the general emancipation proclaimed later that year look less like an ideological gift and more like the only remaining source of soldiers.

Between 1783 and 1792 the outfitters of Nantes sent ships to the African coast and sold the people they carried in the French Caribbean, above all in Saint-Domingue. Twenty six of those expeditions have surviving accounts, and one figure decides almost all of them. Where the fitting out cost worked out at between 950 and 1,000 livres for each captive delivered, the voyage came out level. Below that it earned and above that it lost, and the further the figure sat from the band the larger the gain or the loss. In 1788 the Sainte Anne, fitted out by Clanchy and Parran for about 380,000 livres, landed 440 people at a delivered cost of 866 livres each while the sale price stood near 1,550, and the accounts closed well. Joubert's Aigle cost about 400,000 livres in 1786 and sold only 260 people, putting the delivered cost above 1,500 against a sale price of 1,300, and it failed.

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.

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.