European writers admire the Indians of the Caribbean after their extermination

Father Dutertre published his general history of the Antilles inhabited by the French in 1667, and Labat published his new voyage to the isles of America in 1772. Both could write about the good qualities of the people they called savages without any risk, since a degree of fascination with that way of life was in fashion among educated readers. The fashion had a limit, and the limit ran along the line of profit. Writers were readier to describe and exalt the life of the Indians of the Caribbean once those Indians had already been exterminated, and could even dwell on the horror of the extermination and call it the shame of Europe. About the African held in slavery, on plantations then making France rich, the same writers managed a vague compassion and little else. Labat owned slaves himself. Respect was extended chiefly when a maroon in revolt compelled it.

In March 1685 the French crown issued the edict known as the Code Noir. Its sixty articles set out how enslaved people in the French colonies were to be held, fed, clothed, punished, married, baptised and buried. It required conversion to Catholicism and expelled Jews from the colonies. It defined the enslaved as movable property while also treating them as persons capable of crime and of religious duty, a contradiction the colonial courts spent a century managing. It fixed that a child followed the condition of its mother, which made every child born to an enslaved woman the property of her owner and made rape profitable. It placed some limits on masters, requiring rations and clothing and forbidding certain killings, and enforcement of those limits was rare. The edict framed French colonial slavery until 1848. Saint-Domingue was the colony where it governed the most people, and the people it governed there ended it themselves in 1793.

Some time after Easter in 1704 a young woman named Kimpa Vita, baptised Beatrice, joined the old prophetess in burning charms and crosses in the villages around Mount Kimbangu. She was said to die every Friday and return to life every Sunday. The Capuchin Bernardo da Gallo questioned her and she told him she was St Anthony, come from heaven. He asked, crudely, if there were Kongolese blacks up there and whether they still had their colour. She answered that there were Kongolese adults and children who had kept God's law, and that nobody there was black or white, because heaven has no colour. Pressed on why she burned crosses as well as charms, she said the crosses had superstition mixed into them too. She had given away everything she owned, as the friars did, and she was preaching that the people must go back to Sao Salvador. About that she was right.

On 23 January 1745 a court in Orange County, Virginia convicted a woman named Eve of mixing poison into the milk of her owner, Peter Montague, who had languished four months before dying. The record calls the act feloniously and traitorously done, and she was burned at the stake. Virginia treated the killing of a master by a slave as a species of treason, on the model of the English rule under which a wife who killed her husband committed petit treason. Trial records from Virginia counties usually run to a few lines listing the accused, the charge and the outcome, so cases with this much detail are rare. Where a method is named it is almost always something put into food or drink, which is what European ideas about poisoning expected. In four trials between 1763 and 1798 the accused were said to have poisoned their owners while pretending to give them medicine.