The burning of Cap Francais becomes a large sheet for sale in Paris

White anchors her argument in specific sheets. Jean-Baptiste Chapuy engraved a view of the burning of the city of Cap Francais on 21 June 1793 and published it in Paris in 1794 at fifty two by seventy three centimetres, a size meant for display rather than for a book. Prints in this family carry titles about the sacking of the city and the forty days of fire, and they render a crowd out of control. Flames rise and smoke spreads while barefoot black men with axes, knives and clubs attack respectable looking white men, and black men and women pull down buildings and carry off clothing, jewels and swords. She invokes the idea of a pornography of pain, the pleasure audiences take in horror while calling it sympathy, and notes that here it was the slave owners rather than the enslaved who were cast as the victims.

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.

Most of the colony's black population had been freed officially only by the commissioner's emancipation decree of 1793, which a law of 1794 and the French constitution of 1795 then confirmed. Girard adds the qualification that changes the map. In the western and southern districts under English occupation at the time, slavery simply continued until 1798. Emancipation was therefore not a single event but a patchwork with a five year gap, and the people who lived through that gap were exactly the population of Rigaud's south. Girard uses the point to explain why the 1801 constitution had to enshrine emancipation preemptively. Bonaparte's constitution of 1799 had vaguely provided that colonies would be governed by separate laws, which implied that colonial subjects were not full citizens and that slavery might one day return.

In the same year that he imagined an integrated colonial legislature, Rush told the American Philosophical Society that the colour of African skin was the result of a kind of leprosy. The consequence he drew was that if physicians found a cure, Africans would turn white, the racial justification for slavery and disenfranchisement would disappear, and the formerly enslaved, restored to what he considered their true condition, would be fit for American citizenship. Meanwhile he advised against unions across the colour line for fear of spreading the supposed disease. White declines to call this simple hypocrisy. Rush kept both positions through the 1790s, reprinting the peace office proposal in 1798 while continuing to argue for a medical origin of blackness. The case shows that images let him picture an end to racial violence that his own prose could not support, and it shows whiteness being reasserted as the precondition of political rights.