Polverel tells the freed that the land does not belong to them

Fick treats Polverel's work code of 7 February 1794 as the clearest statement of what emancipation would and would not include. His preamble addresses the farm workers as Africains and tells them plainly that the land is not theirs and belongs to those who bought it or their heirs. They had a right to part of the yield only as payment for labour, and only if they worked a full six days a week as under slavery. Being free, they could choose to take Saturdays off, but then their share fell from one third of collective revenues to one sixth, and a four-day week earned nothing at all, after which the owner could expel them and hire day labourers, owing them neither shelter nor kitchen garden. Articles 22 and 23 required commanders and managers to explain all this to them in Kreyol.

On 31 December 1792 the Nantes house of Chaurand ruled off the accounts of eight fully documented slaving voyages. After the initial payments they had expected 2.8 million livres from buyers in the French Caribbean. They were credited with 2.3 million, about eighty two per cent of it. Holding back a slice of the price had become ordinary practice among colonial buyers, and roughly a tenth of the money owed was never handed over at all. Across the port as a whole, people in the colonies owed the Nantes traders something like 45 million livres arising from the previous decade of slaving alone, divided between deliveries still under way, deliveries of the last three years and older debts. That is close to three quarters of the 63 million livres the Nantes houses afterwards recorded as lost through the Haitian Revolution. Rather than put fresh money into the islands the traders began taking over the management and then the ownership of plantations that could not pay them.

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 1794 the people of Philadelphia raised fourteen thousand dollars for refugees from Saint Domingue. Thirteen thousand of it paid to send white refugees back to the island. Another four thousand was collected to buy passages to France, and more went to widows of men who had died in the colony. Black refugees were given no relief by the French authorities, by the government of George Washington or by the private donors. At that moment Absalom Jones and Richard Allen were collecting small sums to build the African Church of Philadelphia, which became the first black church erected in the United States. White philanthropy turned toward the fleeing colonists and the church fund stalled. Its organisers had spent two years gathering three thousand five hundred dollars. Twelve thousand was raised in a few days for slaveholders who had just lost the labour of the people they owned.