Three British Caribbean revolts demand a law that was never passed

Within fifteen years of Waterloo the British islands produced three risings that rank among the biggest anywhere in the Americas: Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831. Geggus points out that the timing of each tracked a development in the antislavery movement in Britain, and that each set of rebels called for the enforcement of a freedom law they wrongly took to have passed at home and to be hidden by officials on the spot. He counts over twenty such episodes between 1789 and the early 1830s where the enslaved insisted that a law had already freed them, or had cut their week down to three days of work. He traces the syndrome back to an aborted rising on Martinique in August 1789 and connects it to reform efforts in England, France and Spain that slaveholders publicly resisted.

Felix Darfour was born in western Sudan, taken to France by an officer of the Egyptian expedition, educated and married there, and settled in Haiti in 1818, where the constitution granted nationality to any African who came to live in the country. He founded a newspaper, L'Eclaireur, later renamed L'Avertisseur. On 30 August 1822 a message from him was read to the Chamber of Representatives. It said that Jean-Pierre Boyer favoured foreigners with a monopoly of commerce, that Haitian fortunes could not rise under him, and that the president gave advantages only to men of colour while refusing blacks instruction in order to prove them naturally unfit to govern. Boyer ordered him tried by a military commission on the morning of 31 August. He was sentenced the same day and shot on 2 September in front of the people and the army. Darfour was a civilian tried by soldiers, and the petition itself never entered the case file.

Haiti's secretary general B. Inginac wrote to the antislavery American James Tredwell inviting people of colour in the United States to emigrate to the republic. Tredwell, who had already visited Haiti, printed the letter in his 1818 book on the Haitian constitution, and the Niles Weekly Register republished it in October 1818 under a headline about people of colour. Daut contrasts the publicity here with the secrecy around Petion's support for Bolivar. Free soil was a doctrine the government wanted the Atlantic world to know about: anyone escaping slavery who reached Haitian ground was free, and the invitation extended that principle into an offer of citizenship for free Black Americans. Ministers issued public statements to the same effect. The policy fixed Haiti in the minds of Black Americans as a real alternative jurisdiction for decades, and was later broadened under Boyer.

Conditions in the Haitian capital were tightening. A French warship had arrived to blockade the port and stop rebel forces leaving, and its captain was reporting to Spanish officials in Cuba and promising to prevent Mina from sailing. Two weeks after Mina left, a Frenchman naturalised in Spain arrived from Cuba aboard a trading ship loaded with tobacco, sent by the captain general to spy on the expedition. Passing easily as a commercial agent selling contraband, he gained the confidence of both Sutherland and Bolivar within three days. With Mina gone he concentrated on Bolivar and collected a great deal about the plans for a second assault on the mainland. Lewis observes that had the man been sent to kill Bolivar he would have had little difficulty, since the two spent several days in each other's company. He simply gathered his information and left.