The man who spoke for the black revolution was a white merchant

Johnson corrects a persistent error in the literature, which describes Louverture's envoy as a man of colour. Bunel was the son of a successful Norman merchant, a merchant at Cap-Francais in his own right, and paymaster general of the colony from 1787, and had grown rich on the sugar, coffee and indigo the slave system produced. A French general and the bishop of Saint-Domingue both identified him plainly as a Frenchman, the second in contemptuous terms, and none of the sixteen American newspapers that covered his four month mission gave him any racial description at all, though the same press routinely called Louverture black. He was married to Marie Francoise Mouton Bunel, a black woman, and his French adversaries and an American opposition partisan alike used that marriage to discredit him and, through him, the revolution. Where this account departs from the standard one: Works by Egerton, Wills, Tansill and Logan present Bunel as black or mulatto; Johnson shows from French and American sources that he was white.

Manigat explains the pedagogy behind the kingdom's schools. Joseph Lancaster, a British educator who lived from 1778 to 1838, introduced in England in 1798 a system of popular education promoted by a foundation first called the Royal Lancasterian Institution and later the British and Foreign School Society, whose aim was to make education universal and by which a single master could comfortably run a school of a thousand pupils through eight graded classes. Lancaster published his views in 1803 in a widely noticed book, and a manual followed. Two principles gave the method its originality: all classes ran simultaneously in one large hall, with the first learning letters at the master's desk, classes two to seven working on slates and class eight allowed pen and ink; and the ablest pupils were trained as monitors to teach rows of their fellows, multiplying instructors from within.

Roume had sent Devaux and then Sasportas to Curacao with narrow instructions: recruit privateers for the Jamaica operation and nothing else. Girard quotes the order to think only of Jamaica, and he uses it to knock down the claim by Loker and others that the pair were meant to start a slave revolt on the Dutch island. Curacao looked promising because the Netherlands was allied to France and the island held several hundred French residents and a thousand Jews, many of them Sasportas relatives on his mother's side. Their sympathies were another matter, since Jewish owners held roughly a sixth of the island's enslaved people. Devaux exceeded his brief and conspired against Governor Lauffer, who arrested both men and shipped them back to Saint-Domingue. Lauffer never published the secret instructions he seized, which is why the setback did not end the plan. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against Loker and others, Girard argues the Curacao mission was about hiring privateers and was never an attempt to raise a slave revolt there.

Naval war with Britain had destroyed the French merchant fleet, leaving Saint-Domingue dependent on American shipping, so when Congress embargoed French colonies in retaliation for privateering the colony's export economy stopped. Louverture wrote to Adams expressing surprise and sadness that American vessels had abandoned his ports, and sent Joseph Bunel to carry the letter and argue the case. Girard notes that Louverture staffed his civil administration almost entirely with white secretaries, priests, merchants and clerks, since Black and mixed-race men dominated the army, and that sending a white envoy to a slaveholding republic was ordinary politics rather than an anomaly. Bunel met Secretary of State Pickering and a congressional delegation from South Carolina, then dined with Adams. Pickering, describing the mission in his correspondence, identified Louverture as the Black commander in chief and called Bunel merely a messenger, saying nothing of his colour.