A governor bars black refugees from landing in Pennsylvania

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.

Between 1799 and 1800 the general Andre Rigaud, backed by the mulatto officers and proprietors of the southern peninsula, fought Toussaint Louverture, who by then governed the rest of the colony in fact. French agents on the ground worked both sides in the interest of the metropolis. The fighting ended with Rigaud in exile in France. The episode became the founding text for a way of reading Haitian politics in which every alliance and every betrayal is explained by the skin of the man who made it. The actual line-ups were untidy. Toussaint suppressed maroon settlement and the radicalism of large sections of the black field population with the help of powerful mulattoes and whites. His administration protected large estates, kept manufacturing on the plantation model and tied cultivators to the land by military coercion. In 1803 Alexandre Petion, who had come back from France in Leclerc's army, worked out the strategy of the independence war with Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

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.

Girard's conclusion turns a linguistic profile into a political verdict. Born to Arada parents in a French Caribbean colony, Toussaint lived at the intersection of African, American and European worlds but did not weigh them equally. By pushing Ewe-Fon into the background, Girard argues, he buries pan-African interpretations of his career. Unlike the autonomist planters of the eighteenth century or Haitian nationalists today, he did not use Kreyol to assert creole pride, which cuts against readings of him as a proto-independentist. The language he preferred in writing, and often in speech, was the one he associated with social advancement: French, the language of a colonial system he never got out of. Girard characterises his French as laborious and almost ashamed, the French of a provincial arriving in the capital full of ambition and trying to hide his accent. Where this account departs from the standard one: Argues against both the pan-African and the proto-independentist readings of Toussaint, on the evidence of his linguistic choices rather than his politics.