The execution of Louis XVI pushes the insurgents into Spanish service

Bell marks 21 January 1793, the day Louis XVI was guillotined in France, as a hinge for Saint Domingue. The insurgent leaders had fought under royalist colours and had justified their rising as loyalty to a king said to have willed their freedom. With the king dead, that framing collapsed and the surviving mechanism was patronage. Spain, at war with the French Republic and holding the eastern two thirds of the island, could offer commissions, arms and legitimacy to black commanders who would not serve regicides. Bell follows Toussaint into Spanish service and shows him accumulating territory and troops along the mountain corridor from Gonaives toward the Central Plateau, which is the position from which he issued the Camp Turel proclamation that summer once the Republic changed its own terms.

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.

With almost no navy in the region, the Convention fell back in January 1793 on licensing privateers. Girard reports the results as a bargain for the Republic, with corsairs operating out of Guadeloupe alone taking about eighteen hundred prizes between 1794 and 1798 at minimal cost to the treasury. The practice also advertised the regime's principles, since many crews included black sailors and at least fifteen captains are known to have been black. He sets against this the British counterpoint. The Royal Navy made a policy of selling captured black privateers into slavery and operated under the punitive Articles of War of 1749. The contrast is the mechanism of the whole article in miniature. The side that offered freedom recruited from the majority population, and the side that offered sale into bondage had to import and bury its own men.

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.