Aquin sells plantation land in peasant-sized units before independence

Reviewing John Garrigus's study of Saint-Domingue's free people of colour, Geggus singles out the parish of Aquin for anticipating post-independence changes in the late 1790s by selling off plantation land in peasant-sized units. He notes that Garrigus's socioeconomic base is nine thousand notarial documents, mostly from three of the colony's fifty-two parishes on the south coast, which lets him measure the rapid ascent of the free coloured elite in the last decades of the old regime. Two findings cut against current assumptions. Modern historians have exaggerated the wealth of the group, which was not made up of the men of immense capital C. L. R. James imagined. And although recent scholarship has popularised a special connection between people of colour and coffee, Garrigus finds indigo and cotton were the main sources of wealth for the people he studied. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus endorses Garrigus's demonstration that the wealth of Saint-Domingue's free coloured elite has been overstated since C. L. R. James, and his scepticism about the recently popular idea that the free coloured population contained a military leadership class.

Renda separates the two events that other accounts fuse. She states that secret services in the woods of the north nurtured the will to rebel through the summer of 1791, that one such service is said to have taken place on 14 August led by a priest named Boukman and a priestess whose name is not known, and that those present swore an oath of solidarity to revolt. A week later, on the night of 22 August, the enslaved people of the northern plains burned the cane and turned on their owners. She uses the conch shell as her thread. It calls people across distance, summons work gangs, ends the working day and opens a religious service, and marines on patrol more than a century later were badly unnerved by the sound of conches and drums coming out of the hills around them without knowing why. Where this account departs from the standard one: Renda dates the Bois Caiman oath to 14 August 1791 and the rising to 22 August, splitting into two events what many accounts place on a single night.

The clearest demonstration of Girard's thesis is the Saint Lucia expedition of June 1795. Victor Hugues sent about three hundred men from Guadeloupe against twenty four hundred well equipped British soldiers. They carried the promise of freedom, drew heavy support from the enslaved population, fought as guerillas and took the island. The naming of the resulting force is itself part of the history. British reports called the men who joined brigands, the word normally used for maroons, while French accounts called them the French army of the woods. Hugues ran the same play elsewhere, using the black Caribs of Saint Vincent, sponsoring a large rising in Grenada across 1795 and 1796, and drawing up smaller schemes against Saint Christopher and Curacao. Girard notes that several of these islands had been French within living memory and still held French speaking populations, so the campaign for black freedom doubled as a bid to recover lost territory.

Pierrot cites a London Gazette article of December 1798 celebrating Toussaint as a man born to vindicate the claims of his species and to show that character is independent of exterior colour, and telling every liberal Briton to feel proud that this country had brought about the happy revolution. The same article called him a negro chief or king. The mechanism the article identifies is threefold. Praising the individual detached him from his troops, his struggle and his country; describing him as a chief or king moved him out of politics and into a literary register British readers already knew; and crediting Britain with the outcome erased four years of British warfare against the very revolution being celebrated. Claims that Toussaint was of royal African extraction, true or not, served the same displacement.