Three men walk into the Convention and slavery ends in the Republic

On 3 February 1794 a delegation from Saint-Domingue reached the French National Convention in Paris and demanded abolition. The next day the Convention decreed the end of slavery throughout the Republic. The delegation was built on purpose to be unanswerable: Jean-Baptiste Belley, born in Senegal and formerly enslaved, Jean-Baptiste Mills, a free man of mixed descent, and Louis Dufaÿ, a white colonist. Three men, three legal categories, one demand. Now the part that matters more than the decree. Paris did not abolish slavery because Paris had a moral awakening. Paris ratified a fact that an armed population in the colony had already established on the ground and that France could no longer reverse militarily. Read the decree as a receipt rather than as a gift. Napoleon proved the point in 1802 when he tried to take it back and found out what it had cost to establish.

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.

Dubois tracks how the ceremony entered the record, and the chain is short and compromised. Antoine Dalmas was the only person who wrote about Bois-Caiman at the time. He had served as a surgeon on the Gallifet plantation, survived the insurrection on the northern plain and fled into exile in the United States, where in 1793 and 1794 he wrote a memoir describing how, before carrying out the plan made at the 14 August meeting, the conspirators held a kind of celebration or sacrifice involving a black pig surrounded by fetishes and strange offerings. He presented it as the ultimate expression of African barbarism. Dubois notes that the earliest written version of the speech comes from Herard Dumesle and did not attribute it to Boukman, and that an oath appears only in an account recorded a decade later and used by Ardouin. Where this account departs from the standard one: Shows that the speech now universally attributed to Boukman was neither recorded at the time nor originally credited to him.

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.