The enslaved of the North began their revolt in the same night as the Rasteau meeting, with Bouckman among the first leaders.

Meanwhile the ASSEMBLÉE COLONIALE, sitting at Léogane, after three days of deliberation, decreed on 8 August that Saint-Domingue was an integral part of the French empire. This decree had at bottom no other aim than to shelter it from all suspicion of a project of independence. It declared that to itself alone belonged the right to regulate the political and commercial relations of the colony; this was to return deviously to the separatist principles of the assembly of Saint-Marc; it was above all to deny the National Assembly the right to pronounce on the fate of the freedmen. Finally it decreed on the 11th that it adjourned to the 25th the reopening of its sessions in the city of the Cap. But at the same time as the freedmen refused to abandon themselves to the mercy of this assembly, the enslaved of the North raised the standard of revolt; and by a strange coincidence this revolt began on the same day, in the same night, as that in which the freedmen, gathered at the house of mademoiselle Rasteau, were settling their taking up of arms.

The enslaved began their movements with pillage and arson. At the head of this almost savage population, whose overflow the unfortunate Ogé so feared and which he wished gradually to lead to freedom, we see first appear Bouckman, an African originally imported into Jamaica, whence he was brought to Saint-Domingue. He began by assassinating his enslaver, M. Clément, a resident of the Limbe, whose coachman he was; and at the head of the work gang that he had roused, he set fire to the plantation. His principal lieutenants were Jean-François and Georges Biassou, the first a coachman of M. Bullet, and the second a sugar refiner on the Biassou plantation. The insurgents spared neither sex nor childhood. Some, furnished with the arms of their enslavers whom they had killed; the greater number, with hoes, lances, billhooks, all marching to the mournful sound of the conch, to the funereal tolling of the bells of the plantations, they made in less than seventeen days, of the rich plain of the North, a heap of ruins covered with corpses.