Tula reasons from the Dutch defeat to his own freedom

By late September the Curaçao revolt was suppressed. Two whites had been killed against about a hundred enslaved people, and some thirty were executed. Oostindie preserves the reasoning Tula gave to the Catholic priest Jacobus Schinck, sent to persuade the rebels to surrender: they had been badly treated too long, wished nobody harm, sought their freedom, the blacks of the French Caribbean had been given theirs, Holland had been taken over by the French, and so they too must be free. Tula added that all people descend from the same parents and that animals were better treated than slaves. Oostindie sets this against the public prosecutor, who declared himself a mortal enemy of the rack and of anything resembling cruelty and then demanded exactly those punishments. Rebels were racked, burned in the face and dismembered, and no protest followed in the Netherlands.

The wars that began with the rising of August 1791 broke the plantation economy of Saint-Domingue by destroying the two things it ran on, forced labour and fixed capital. The export figures show the scale. Measured against their levels of 1789, in 1795 sugar exports stood at 1.2 percent, coffee at 2.8 percent, cotton at 0.7 percent and indigo at 0.5 percent. All four except indigo recovered strongly up to 1802, and then the French invasion of that year pushed them down again, leaving 1804 with sugar at 34 percent, coffee at 40, cotton at 43 and indigo at 4 percent of pre revolutionary levels. Reports from 1803 describe burned cities, demolished sugar mills, carbonised beams and plantations reduced to ash, with only the small plots of coffee and food crops showing any life. The population fell from 520,000 in 1790 to 380,000 in 1805.

The French traveller Moreau de Saint-Mery published the first volume of his description of the French part of Hispaniola in 1797. He had presided over the electors of Paris in July 1789. His account of the rites and beliefs of enslaved people is the earliest to come near what was actually happening, and he still condemned what he had watched as a kind of bacchanal that ended in disgusting prostitution. He noted that the participants were Arada people, from the town of Allada in Dahomey, and that they lived by the rules of their religion. Worship centred on dances around a snake kept in a wired box on an altar, from which the faithful were said to gain knowledge of past and future. A goat was killed and its blood poured over those present, who swore to stay faithful. He described the trance that followed without a word for what it was.

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.