France's navy minister proposes sending freed soldiers against Jamaica

Girard traces the invasion idea back three years before Sasportas ever drafted anything. Instructions issued under the navy minister Laurent Truguet proposed using the soldiers most committed to liberty, meaning the freed men of Saint-Domingue, to strike at Jamaica. What made the idea plausible was Victor Hugues in Guadeloupe, who had defended his island by freeing and drafting the enslaved and had then carried the same method outward into Grenada, Saint Vincent and Saint Lucia, where French freedmen fought alongside local enslaved people and the Black Caribs. Officials in Paris reasoned that the far larger colony of Saint-Domingue could serve as the launching point for something bigger. Etienne Laveaux repeated the argument in 1798, calling the island the hinge of French power in the hemisphere. The plan stayed theoretical only while British troops still occupied parts of Saint-Domingue.

Colonial law in Saint Domingue said very little about the religious practices of the enslaved. Through the eighteenth century it forbade dances and night gatherings over and over, leaving the name of the religion out of the text. That changed in 1797, when the French civil commissioner Leger Felicite Sonthonax prohibited vaudou meetings by name. Sonthonax was the official who had proclaimed general emancipation in the North four years earlier. In 1800 Toussaint Louverture repeated the prohibition and widened it to cover all night gatherings, and the reason recorded at the time was that such meetings were carrying talk of massacring the anciens libres, the people of colour who had been free before the revolution. By 1803 a colonist was describing vaudou as an obscene dance used to encourage murder. Leaders who had come out of the plantations themselves were now policing the ceremonies their own soldiers attended.

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.

An anonymous German engraving of about 1797 shows the rising of 1791 on the northern plain with palm trees and conical roofed houses for tropical atmosphere, while the white figures look lifted from a north European genre painting, the women in familiar headgear and the men in tight suits. An image of the cruelty of the blacks in a Swiss almanac of 1803 does the same work through architecture, staging a murder in a room with a tiled floor, an arched doorway and portraits and a map on the walls. White argues that these choices are deliberate rather than ignorant, since the makers invented fanciful costume for the enslaved and could have used French styles for the colonists. Dressing the victims as locals delivered an anti revolutionary message to German and Swiss viewers, and shows that printmakers could not count on shared skin colour alone to produce sympathy across old European rivalries.