A colonial official describes the dance called Don Pedre

Moreau de Saint-Mery published his description of French Saint-Domingue in Paris in 1797 and recorded a dance he called the Danse a Don Pedre. He said it resembled another dance he had already described and was far more hectic in its movements. It sometimes killed the people who performed it. Onlookers were caught by the convulsive movements, joined in with chanting and a hurrying rhythm, and pushed the dancers toward a crisis they partly shared. The name attached to a whole family of spirits later called Petwo, which Haitians tell apart from the cooler Rada spirits by speed, heat and hardness. The interest of the passage lies in its date. The stylistic split between the two kinds of service was already present at the end of the eighteenth century, before the republic existed and long before any scholar tried to sort the spirits by their supposed African origins.

News of the French takeover of the Dutch Republic and the creation of the Batavian Republic had already been part of Tula's argument the previous year. In 1796 it worked its way through the colonial administration. The ancien régime governor Johannes de Veer withdrew and was replaced by a politically colourless local bureaucrat, Jan Jacob Beaujon, who was in turn replaced by an apparently more outspoken pro-French Patriot, Johann Rudolf Lauffer, all within the same year. Oostindie stresses that this reshuffle reflected dynamics inside the white elite, between Orangists and Patriots but also within Patriot circles, over questions that came down to trade and economic interest. Sections of the free coloured population had their own stake in the 1796 power games, mainly better representation in local politics, and there is evidence of open and sometimes violent free coloured protest, but no sign of organised cross-colour action aiming at radical change.

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.

In the middle of June 1798 four vessels from Saint Domingue reached Philadelphia. Governor Thomas Mifflin forbade the landing of any of the black passengers aboard them and asked President John Adams for authority to stop such landings in neighbouring states and to keep their owners out of Pennsylvania altogether. The fear behind the order had been building for years. Enslaved people had set a series of fires in Albany in November 1793, the practice was said to have spread, night patrols in Philadelphia were increased, and a fire broke out in the city on 4 January 1797. White Philadelphians had come to speak of black insurrection as an infection that ships could carry. The standoff ended when letters from the white colonists on board assured the city that only fifty five enslaved people were with them and that none had ever carried arms.