The burning of Le Cap killed between three and ten thousand people

Geggus summarises Jeremy Popkin's account of the days in June 1793 when Cap Français was burned and looted, thousands of colonists sailed into exile, and slavery was abolished across the colony within months. Popkin estimates a death toll between three and ten thousand and calls it the most murderous instance of urban conflict in the history of the Americas, a claim Geggus notes appears to overlook the sack of Tenochtitlán in 1521. The destruction came out of a power struggle between General Thomas Galbaud and Commissar Sonthonax, backed respectively by white sailors and free men of colour, with insurgent slaves recruited by an offer of emancipation playing a belated and subsidiary part. Geggus finds the contingency argument uncontroversial but doubts that the June days were indispensable to French abolition. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus argues Popkin gives his own topic too much weight, since Sonthonax's circumstances made some other disaster likely to push him toward the insurgents, and lists three necessary causes of the summer 1793 emancipation decrees instead: Sonthonax's already-publicised antislavery beliefs, the undefeated northern insurrection, and the outbreak of war between the colonial powers in February and March 1793.

Reviewing John Garrigus's study of Saint-Domingue's free people of colour, Geggus singles out the parish of Aquin for anticipating post-independence changes in the late 1790s by selling off plantation land in peasant-sized units. He notes that Garrigus's socioeconomic base is nine thousand notarial documents, mostly from three of the colony's fifty-two parishes on the south coast, which lets him measure the rapid ascent of the free coloured elite in the last decades of the old regime. Two findings cut against current assumptions. Modern historians have exaggerated the wealth of the group, which was not made up of the men of immense capital C. L. R. James imagined. And although recent scholarship has popularised a special connection between people of colour and coffee, Garrigus finds indigo and cotton were the main sources of wealth for the people he studied. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus endorses Garrigus's demonstration that the wealth of Saint-Domingue's free coloured elite has been overstated since C. L. R. James, and his scepticism about the recently popular idea that the free coloured population contained a military leadership class.

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.

In 1792 Benjamin Rush drafted a plan for a peace office in the federal government and specified its decoration, including ploughshares beaten from swords and five life sized paintings. Four showed enemies reconciled, a Native American and a Kentucky settler cooking venison in one pot, Cornwallis and Tipu Sultan sharing a decanter of Madeira, French and Austrian soldiers dancing arm in arm. The fifth proposed a Saint-Domingue planter, a man of colour and a native of Africa legislating together in one colonial assembly. White reads the timing closely. The French law of 4 April 1792 had just granted political rights to free men of colour, which white colonists were obstructing, so the picture endorsed that law, and by seating an African in the chamber it anticipated by nearly two years the decision to free the enslaved and make black men citizens. The plan appeared in Benjamin Banneker's almanac.