A London radical praises the black rebels during Britain's war

Hormann concedes that hostility to the black rebels dominated mainstream British discourse and became almost universal during the years of British military involvement, and then insists on the exceptions. The radical agitator and lecturer John Thelwall voiced a dissenting opinion in a public lecture delivered in London at the height of that involvement. The chapter treats such moments as decisive for the argument, because they show that class, political orientation and economic interest shaped what Britons could say about the revolution, rather than a uniform racial incapacity to think it. The wider setting was Britain's own war in the colony, launched in 1793 to profit from the civil conflict there and defeated by Louverture's troops by 1798, a failure that hardened British opinion and set back the abolitionist campaign for a decade.

Starvation ended the Second Carib War. The British had worked out that destroying the hidden provision grounds would do what pursuit could not, and the survivors who came down from the mountains were described by the botanist Alexander Anderson as a spectacle of misery. Britain then decided to remove them from St Vincent altogether. They were shipped first to Balliceaux, a small island nearby, where roughly half of them died under British military supervision, probably of continued famine together with yellow fever or some similar epidemic. Nancie Gonzalez counts 4,338 deported to Balliceaux and 2,248 alive to make the onward voyage to Roatan, an island off the coast of Honduras. Years later a Guatemalan envoy, Jose Rossi y Rubi, came to Roatan to negotiate resettlement on the Central American mainland and asked one of their leaders where his loyalties lay. The man answered that he commanded in nobody's name and was a Carib subordinate to no one.

Pennsylvania freed any enslaved person whose owner brought them into the state and settled there for six months. Colonists arriving from Saint Domingue met the deadline and then signed the newly freed person to an indenture, until the age of twenty eight for a child, or seven years for anyone over twenty one. Most of the black refugees were teenagers, so the term ran for most of their working youth. Between 1791 and 1795 some 284 slaveholding colonists released 442 people, and nearly all went straight into indentures which the former owners then sold for cash to farmers who wanted labour cheaper than white wages. Of 659 people released from bondage in the city between 1789 and 1810, forty five walked away outright. One colonist tried to beat the clock by moving her slaves across the river to Burlington after five months and three weeks; the abolition society argued six lunar months of twenty eight days and won.

The 1795 constitution replaced the 1794 decree with a clause saying a person may hire out time and services but cannot sell himself or be sold, and that his person is not alienable property. Slavery is not mentioned. The article shows why this mattered by noting that the meaning of the clause came up in debate and needed clarification from the floor. Recast as a restriction on freedom of contract rather than a protection of individual liberty, the ban borrows the vocabulary of natural law arguments that had historically been used to defend slavery, since those arguments assumed a right to sell oneself. The effect was to sever the ban from the insurgency in Saint-Domingue that had forced it, and to reopen the question of how competing universal rights, especially property against liberty, should be balanced.