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This chapter deciphers principles developed during the Haitian Revolution by slave masses in flight. Its twofold objectives are a refutation of scholarship reducing the notions of freedom in the revolution to Toussaint’s vision; and explanation of the transhistorical, macropolitical, sociogenic conception of flight. Prior interpretations of marronage and the revolution describe flight while reifying a long-standing false binary in studies of slave societies: flight or structural reordering, whereby acts of flight are separated from investigations into revolutionary politics. The chapter argues sociogenic marronage allows us finally to discern how revolutions are themselves moments of flight ushering in new orders. Frantz Fanon’s philosophy illuminates facets of the sociogenic and reaffirms the importance of the psychological to the lived experience of freedom. Sociogenic marronage has four core principles: 1) naming, 2) imagined blueprints of freedom [vèvè architectonics], 3) the state of society, and 4) constitutionalism. Examination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s Declaration of Independence, the activities of slaves, Haiti’s 1805 Constitution, and an Edwidge Danticat short story vis-à-vis these principles underscore revolution’s relation to flight. It also highlights an adage of marronage philosophy: the ability of individuals to become free and to exit from that condition is fundamental to the human condition.

Whereas the previous chapter focused on the effects of events in Saint-Domingue on the French merchant community and on political sentiment in the French ports, this one examines events in the Caribbean and especially in Saint-Domingue. It discusses the complexities of the race question on the island, and especially the status of free people of colour, which dominated discussion during the early months of the Revolution. It also shows how, with the slave revolts and insurrections, opinions hardened after 1791, how the French administration became more dependent on the support of the mulattoes, and how the situation in Saint-Domingue was complicated by foreign war and invasion. The chapter ends by discussing the role of Toussaint Louverture and Leclerc’s fateful expedition

After taking control of the central state apparatus in Santo Domingo, Toussaint attempted to create a profitable plantation economy by imposing restrictive labor regimes on former slaves and offering economic incentives to plantation entrepreneurs. This chapter details the efficacy of these efforts along with that of Toussaint’s attempts to eliminate slaving in both parts of Hispaniola during this time. This part of the work grapples with Toussaint’s place in Dominican history and the role of Santo Domingo in his broader political and economic vision. This vision increasingly clashed with that of Napoleon, who in late 1801 deployed a huge military expedition to Hispaniola (and other key colonies) in order to reassert Paris’s authority. Though this expedition succeeded in deposing Toussaint, it set in motion processes that fatally undermined Napoleon’s dream of creating a new French empire in the Western Hemisphere.

The final chapter describes the beginnings of John Audubon's Birds of America in his early career in lower Louisiana and New Orleans. Focusing on Audubon's unpublished journal of his early struggles in lower Louisiana, his published “ornithological biographies” from the region, and his later autobiographical sketch of his birth in and flight from revolutionary Saint-Domingue, the chapter casts new light on his environmental consciousness and visual aesthetics of violence. Read in conjunction with “Myself,” and alongside Audubon's images from Louisiana, the Mississippi River Journal depicts this formative phase in the composition of the Birds of America as a return to the Caribbean vortex—to a semitropical region shaped by plantation slavery and incipient slave revolution.