A crowd walks into Saint Pierre and abolition comes early

Geggus ends with the only two cases where he thinks slave rebellion demonstrably changed the emancipation timetable. In May 1848 a mass entry into the town of Saint Pierre and the fighting that followed in northern Martinique led the governor to declare slavery abolished at once, roughly three months before the decree issued by the new revolutionary government in Paris would have taken effect. He is careful about causation, noting that the decision to abolish had already been taken and was itself what provoked the risings, so the rebellions fixed the date rather than the outcome. The Martinique declaration had immediate effects in the other French colonies and in the Danish islands, where a large rising on Saint Croix in July 1848 cut eleven years off a plan the Danish government had announced the previous year to end slavery in 1859.

In March and April 1848 Faustin Soulouque, then president of Haiti, broke the political families of the south. The trigger was the killing of Celigny Ardouin, a former deputy accused of conspiring against the government. The fighting reached Port-au-Prince and ended in the massacre of members of several southern households. More than seven hundred surviving relatives took shelter in the British legation. In one incident men hunting refugees came to the consul's steps and found a Union Jack laid across them, and none of them would cross it. Minutes before the killing started, Soulouque had sent a note to the British consul Ussher at the palace promising that all foreigners were under his protection. Ussher saw the events and wrote that the object was to strike terror into the respectable mulattoes whom Soulouque had always taken for his enemies. Afterwards Haitians left for Jamaica in numbers larger than any earlier wave of the decade.

Suzanne Simon Baptiste was described by a contemporary as a very large black woman of about forty with the modesty of a girl of twenty, plain in her tastes, who grew coffee with her own hands while her husband governed the colony. Toussaint said he had chosen her himself against the wishes of his owners, who wanted to marry him to younger women, and that before the revolution he had not left her for an hour. On 7 April 1803 her husband died in his cell at the Fort de Joux and she lost any hope of seeing him again. She lived on in France, poor, under a sky that was not hers, for another forty three years, and died on 19 May 1846 at the age of sixty seven. She had held no public office and made no speeches, and her name opens the line of women set beside the men who made the country.

Britain had outlawed the slave trade and spent the middle of the nineteenth century sending envoys to Dahomey to press the kingdom into banning exports and growing palm oil instead. Lieutenant Frederick Forbes recorded a meeting with King Gezo on 4 July 1850. Gezo told him that his nation was a military one, women included, that his income came from selling prisoners of war, and that he could not put his women into the fields because it would kill them. Everyone in the country, he said, was a soldier, and the trade fed them. The argument that Europeans had themselves supplied, that captives who were not sold would be sacrificed instead, had by the 1860s been picked up by the Dahomian court and used back at the British. If he did not sell them, one king pointed out, he would have to kill them, which England would like even less.