Toussaint stays with the slaveholders for eight months after abolition

Girard presses on a fact he finds hard to explain away. Spain stood for monarchy, colonialism and slavery, and in 1793 France offered emancipation and racial equality, yet Louverture remained in Spanish ranks until April 1794, eight months after Sonthonax abolished slavery. Jean-Francois and Biassou never left the Spanish at all and ended their lives in Spanish uniform in obscure campaigns in Honduras and Florida. He uses this to attack what he calls the patriotic need for myth making, which presents Louverture as a lifelong idealistic enemy of slavery and of France. Girard's Louverture is closer to Washington or Bonaparte, a man who saw nothing strange in celebrating freedom while upholding forced labour, suspicious and manipulative, unwilling to show his real intentions to anyone. He notes too that the divisions among black and mixed race commanders are why the war lasted as long as it did. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard emphasises that Louverture fought for slaveholding Spain for eight months after France abolished slavery, against portrayals of him as a consistent abolitionist.

On 12 March 1795 Joseph Chatoyer circulated a proclamation in French among the planters living on St Vincent. It opens with a question. Is there a Frenchman who would hold back at the hour when liberty is being spoken aloud? It asks its readers to gather as citizens and brothers under the colours already flying on the island. The second half sets out what refusal costs. Anyone not assembled with the Caribs by the end of the day would be treated as a traitor to the country, their estates burned and their families killed. The document ends with Chatoyer's own mark in place of a signature, a figure that appears to draw on the rock carvings of St Vincent rather than on any European convention. It survives in the British colonial records. Within days plantations were burning, and the Caribs had allies among French settlers, enslaved people and troops sent from Guadeloupe by Victor Hugues.

On his expedition along the Niger river in 1793 and 1794, Mungo Park reported Mande speakers using amulets made from animal horns filled with saphoes, papers carrying passages from the Koran. In Senegambia, Muslims and others alike had long gone to itinerant scholars for pieces of Arabic writing to put inside protective pouches, and the Portuguese called these bolsas de mandinga. John Matthews, a Royal Navy lieutenant in Sierra Leone in the 1780s, found the same practice further south, powders and scraps of Koranic text in small bags, and recorded that people wore several at once, each against a separate misfortune: one to preserve the wearer from shot, one from poison, one from fire, one from drowning. The bags crossed the Atlantic with the people who wore them. In Bahia the Lisbon Inquisition prosecuted their possession, and men wore them into battle in Jamaica in 1760 and in Bahia in 1835.

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.