Three enslaved people are convicted of poisoning Ambrose Madison

Ambrose Madison finished building the plantation Montpelier in Spotsylvania County, Virginia in 1732, and shortly afterwards three enslaved Africans were accused of poisoning him. He suffered a long wasting illness and died. Their conviction was the first in Virginia of enslaved people for murdering an owner and the first conviction for poisoning. The documentation is thin, but one detail carries weight. The three had help from a man on another property who was said to know about poisons, which points to a relationship between a client and a practitioner. The case set the shape of Virginian poison talk for the rest of the century, in which an enslaved poisoner kills the owner slowly. Elsewhere in the Atlantic the accusations more often concerned other enslaved people. Virginia stood apart in this respect, and of the cases from Brunswick and Cumberland counties between 1740 and 1799, 44 per cent had white targets.

Having taken the coastal kingdoms, Agaja at first let his people trade at two ports, Jakin, which had served Allada, and Whydah. In 1732 he destroyed Jakin, and everything moved to Whydah. His stated aim through these years was to cut out the middlemen who had stood between him and the European ships. When an English captain traded at Jakin in 1727 he had to travel inland to negotiate in person, and the talks covered not only the fee for permission to trade and the price per person but the make up of the cargo itself, three men to every woman, and none the captain did not want. That is a seller specifying his own goods. In 1733 a French agent reported that captives at Whydah were scarce and only the king was selling any. In the same year the king's chief gaoler was executed for selling captives on his own account.

The earliest surviving poison case in the records of the Suriname court dates from 1731 and turns on a calabash. Inside it were pieces of a red stone and a bird's beak. Several enslaved people reported having seen the practitioner who owned it near the graves of the dead and using the calabash to pray to leaves behind his house. Isaac did not deny owning it or using its contents. He said it served medical purposes and that he had never used it to cause harm. Objects of this kind worked as compositions rather than as single ingredients, and their power lay in the assembly and in the words and gestures that activated them. Another Suriname case turned on a small stick packed with herbs and tied up with what may have been cowrie shells. Court volumes survive from 1722 onward with gaps, so earlier trials may have existed and been lost.

Historians agree that a population upsurge began in Europe around 1740, give or take a decade. The mechanism most of them now favour is fertility rather than medicine. Death rates were held down by better food and cleaner habits, and inoculation against smallpox mattered far less than it was once given credit for, since medical treatment had almost no measurable effect on mortality before the twentieth century. What moved the birth rate was the age at which women married. In the seventeenth century, hard times had pushed marriage later and had probably increased the use of withdrawal as a check on births. A run of good harvests between 1715 and 1750 made it possible to set up a household earlier, and the age of marriage fell. More households meant more children. This is the demographic base under the whole expansion that followed, including the expansion of the Atlantic plantation trade.