Toussaint changes sides the moment France outbids Spain on freedom

Toussaint had joined the Spanish with Jean Francois and Biassou and had risen to command the Western Cordon, styling himself a royalist because a king seemed likelier than a republic to concede lasting freedom. Spain, however, lived partly off selling captives taken in the colony, and the British restored slavery wherever they took ground. When word arrived that the French National Assembly had abolished slavery outright, the calculation flipped. Toussaint put on a French brigadier's uniform and turned on his former patrons, using surprise and unusually generous treatment of prisoners to make defection attractive to the units he faced. The work stresses the arithmetic rather than conversion: whichever power actually guaranteed emancipation would command the only army that mattered. By 1796 the Directory had confirmed his promotions, and his roughly twenty thousand men held the decisive balance of power on the island. Corroborated by 3 works in the library.

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.

David Geggus worked through seventy five surviving plantation inventories from Saint Domingue, covering roughly fifteen thousand enslaved people and recording ethnicity, age and sex. Among the African born on sugar estates, the group the records call Congos was the largest in all three regions of the colony. They were 43.5 per cent in the North between 1777 and 1791, 36.3 per cent in the South between 1771 and 1791, and 32.4 per cent in the West between 1773 and 1791. The North was where the rising of 1791 began. The label needs care. John Thornton warns that Congo was used loosely and served the French and the colonial upper class as a term of contempt for the African born. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall notes that the same people were recorded as Congos in French and Spanish colonies and as Angolans in British ones.