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plantation once asked, “How can we make a lot of sugar when we work only sixteen hours [per day]?” The answer, he concluded, was “by consuming men and animals.” And indeed, the Gallifet plantation did consume men, quite quickly and efficiently. These colonial plantations were as close to a death camp as one could come in the late eighteenth century. Overseers carried swords and whips to punish recalcitrant slaves. Few slaves lived past forty and most died within a few years of starting plantation work.
    But as these complex economic relationships played out on the Atlantic, creating a vast network of death and profit, other forces too were at work—forces not amenable to empire or capitalism. Try as they might, the slave owners could not turn people into machines—and people do not submit easily to cruelty and exploitation. One liberal traveler on the island noted the judgment and resentment that the slaves expressed when by themselves. “One has to hear with what warmth and what volubility, and at the same time with what precision of ideas and accuracy of judgment, this creature, heavy and taciturn all day, now squatting before his fire, tells stories, talks, gesticulates, argues, passes opinions, approves or condemns both his master and everyone who surrounds him,” the traveler wrote.
    Had this traveler been an African, he might have discovered much more. He might have known the meaning of the African chant “ Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu! Canga bafio te! Canga, moune de la! Canga do ki la! Canga, li! ” or, in English, “We swear to destroy the whites and all that they possess; let us die rather than fail to keep this vow.” That same traveler, had he been an African, might also have been invited to join certain congresses held late at nights in the woods away from the plantations. For in August of 1791, the slaves were plotting to make their chant a reality. In furtive conversations held far from the planters’ watchful eyes, the slaves decided that this would be their last summer on French-owned plantations. They would start “a war to the death against the whites.” Given all they had suffered, perhaps it was only time.
    On the night of August 21, a band of slaves rose up in arms. The first victim was a refiner’s apprentice. They caught him in the sugar factory and cut him into pieces with cutlasses. When his screams awoke the overseer, the slave-rebels shot the overseer dead too, before proceeding to the apartment of the refiner, whom they killed in his bed. From there, they traveled from plantation to plantation, raising a force of nearly 2,000 slaves, setting fire to the cane fields, killing white women and men, and burning houses. The fires were visible for miles and miles. Their attacks, reported one planter, “spread like a torrent.”
    The group of slaves who began this revolt must have known the punishment for a suspected rebel: ritual torture and death, combined with dismemberment to ensure that their souls could not pass into the afterworld. But perhaps they also knew that staying and working in the fields would lead to death just the same—though in a few years rather than a few days, and by exhaustion and malnutrition, not violence. But those who made Saint Domingue’s sugar were strong and had inspiring leaders.
    The most visible organizer was a coach driver and former slave driver named Boukman, a man known as a religious leader. In the first days of the revolt, Boukman gathered a band of slaves in the woods at a place called Bois-Caiman, where he led the slaves in a religious ceremony. A woman—variously described as having “strange eyes and bristling hair” or having green eyes and being of mixed race—presided with him. “The god of the white man calls him to commit crimes; our god asks only good works of us. But this god who is so good orders revenge,” declared Boukman. “He will direct our hands; he will aid us. Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for