Kongo splits into rival capitals and the wars feed the slave ships

The kingdom of Kongo broke apart in 1667. A rival of the reigning Ndo Luvwalu VI could not remove him, so he had himself proclaimed king under the name Ndo Mfunsu III and set up a capital at Kibangu, in the hills southwest of the old royal city. In the same period another branch of the Kimpanzu lineage crowned its own candidate as Ndo Mpetolo III, who held power from 1667 to 1683 and was followed by Ndo Nzwau Nzuzi Ntamba from 1683 to 1716. They made Kongo dya Lemba, in the territory of Songolo, their seat. Kibangu belonged to the Kimulaza lineage and Kongo dya Lemba to the Kimpanzu, and each treated its capital as the property of one family. The fighting ran for decades. Prisoners taken by one Kongo faction from another were sold on the coast to European buyers, and many were landed in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, where their military training later showed.

Bertrand d'Ogeron reached Tortuga in February 1665 and set about converting hunters and pirates into settled colonists. He pushed cocoa as a crop that paid, and lent money at low interest out of his own pocket to men starting plantations. He also arranged the shipment of about one hundred women from French jails, recorded as orphans, to be married to the settlers. The count of planters rose from 400 to 1,500 by 1669. In June 1670 the colonists revolted briefly over the prices charged by the chartered company, and it passed. When d'Ogeron died on 31 January 1676 the economy of the French west had shifted from raiding to farming, and the civil and religious institutions of a permanent colony were in place. Read the measures together and the shape is plain. Credit for the planters, a crop that sells, and women delivered like stock. The workforce for these fields was already being bought on the African coast.

On 23 March 1668 William Willoughby, governor of Barbados, concluded a treaty with several Carib captains of St Vincent. The island lies directly upwind of Barbados, so a boat pushed off from the sugar plantations there would come ashore on the Vincentian coast with almost no steering required. Enslaved people had worked this out. The treaty obliged the Caribs to seize and deliver up anyone arriving as a fugitive from Barbados or any other English island, and to acknowledge themselves subjects of the English king. In return the English would leave them St Vincent and St Lucia. The Caribs honoured none of it. Thirty two years later the missionary Jean Baptiste Labat found a great number of escaped Africans living on the island, and recorded that the Caribs had stopped selling such people back and now treated them as members of one nation with themselves. The refuge the treaty was written to close stayed open for another century.

Large planters in Virginia began buying enslaved Africans in quantity during the 1670s, as the flow of white indentured servants out of Britain thinned. The reversal took about twenty years. In the late 1670s white servants in the colony outnumbered enslaved black people four to one. By the early 1690s enslaved black people outnumbered servants by the same margin. What replaced indenture differed in kind. A servant served a term and then walked free. A slave served for life, so did the children, and the condition was fixed to skin. Virginia was writing that attachment into statute across these same decades. The pattern repeated across the North American mainland, and it had already taken hold in the Caribbean. I keep it on a Haitian timeline because Saint-Domingue was built on the same logic at greater scale, and because the racial law the mainland invented in the 1670s was still on the books of the United States when Haiti declared independence.