Sonthonax frees everyone after swearing slavery would never end

Paris had dispatched Leger-Felicite Sonthonax with Etienne Polverel and Jean-Antoine Ailhaud to make the decree of 4 April on equal rights for free men of colour stick. On arrival the commissioners announced that slavery would last forever. Two years of general insurrection later, Sonthonax issued a proclamation of general emancipation that stunned the colony's white population, telling the enslaved that the Republic wanted liberty and equality without distinction of colour, that kings had sold them on the African coast, and that the Republic was adopting them as its children. Daut is careful about the causal order. The commissioners did not confer freedom on a passive population; they were overtaken by a revolt they could not defeat and converted its accomplished facts into French law. Sonthonax later styled himself the founder of liberty in the colony, a claim Haitian writers spent the next century contesting. Corroborated by 3 works in the library.

On 12 March 1795 Joseph Chatoyer circulated a proclamation in French among the planters living on St Vincent. It opens with a question. Is there a Frenchman who would hold back at the hour when liberty is being spoken aloud? It asks its readers to gather as citizens and brothers under the colours already flying on the island. The second half sets out what refusal costs. Anyone not assembled with the Caribs by the end of the day would be treated as a traitor to the country, their estates burned and their families killed. The document ends with Chatoyer's own mark in place of a signature, a figure that appears to draw on the rock carvings of St Vincent rather than on any European convention. It survives in the British colonial records. Within days plantations were burning, and the Caribs had allies among French settlers, enslaved people and troops sent from Guadeloupe by Victor Hugues.

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.

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.