News of abolition arrives and Toussaint reopens war on Britain

The British expedition in the Caribbean began as a success, taking most French possessions early in 1793 with strong support from local white planters. Pierrot marks the turn at the abolition decree of February 1794, which freed the enslaved across the French colonies. Word of it reached the island around June, and Toussaint went over to the French and reopened the fighting against the British, who by that point had all but defeated the French. The mechanism is straightforward and Pierrot does not disguise it: Britain fought the Haitian Revolution and lost. That defeat is what makes the later cultural appropriation legible, since presenting Toussaint as a virtual British ally allowed a military reverse to be recast as a strategic move, with Britain benefiting whatever happened next in Saint Domingue. Everything Pierrot examines afterwards is a British answer to a war Britain had already lost.

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.

The Republic's abolition of slavery in February 1794 joined libertarian politics to antislavery and put the resources of a great power behind black self liberation. Geggus stresses the immediate strategic use to which this was put. For several years emancipation became a tool of war directed mainly at Britain's islands, producing the multi class risings in the British Windward Islands that Victor Hugues supported from Guadeloupe and the commissioner Goyrand from Saint Lucia. He suggests the Coro rebellion in Venezuela the same year belongs in this family, given French privateers offshore and the insurgents' call for a republic and for French law, while noting that other historians read the French connection as an alibi invented by Spanish officials to hide their own conduct. He adds that once the Republic adopted emancipation it pushed the policy abroad far more energetically than the black leadership of Saint-Domingue ever did.

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.