The royal council lets the enslaved testify against everyone but their owner

The Code Noir gave enslaved people in the French Caribbean almost no standing in law. One article allowed them to denounce a master who abused them. Another barred their testimony outright, and colonial courts had been ignoring the ban when no better witness existed. On 15 July 1738 the Conseil d'Etat in France settled the question by ruling that enslaved people could give evidence, with one exception written into the ruling: they could say nothing against the person who owned them. The exception protected the only relationship that mattered. A planter could be accused by his neighbour's slaves and never by his own. Magistrates in the colonies routinely destroyed the case files that involved enslaved litigants and witnesses, so the number of surviving records is small. Historians reading colonial criminal papers for the voices of enslaved people are working with what a system designed to silence them happened to leave behind.

An inventory taken in 1738 of a coffle walking from Caconda to the coast at Benguela recorded, for close to one person in ten, an injury to the leg. Umbundu speakers in this region built two new nouns from the same root they used for the diviner and healer, ochimbanda. One was ochimbandanga, an affliction of the legs, a paralysis, which can be read as an affliction caused by sorcery. The other was okambanda, a young slave, formed by adding a diminutive prefix. A young adult was what the Atlantic market wanted most, and such a person had been cut off from their people and was very likely bound. Neighbouring language speakers made similar moves, layering onto an old verb for being strong the sense of being swollen and captured by illness, and building words for disease and health out of a root meaning to tie up. People described the trade in the vocabulary of sickness.

On a Sunday in September 1739 some twenty enslaved men, called Angolans by the colonists and led by a man named Jemmy, broke open a store of firearms near the Stono river in South Carolina. They killed as they went and marched south toward the Spanish settlements around St Augustine, carrying two drums and flying banners. Their numbers reached sixty, and at a large field they stopped, beat the drums and danced in order to draw more people to them. Ninety strong, they met the colonial militia and were scattered after a fight in which they left some of the militia dead. A body of about ten kept going until mounted troops caught them the next day. Seven days after that, a further party stood and fought an open battle against the militia some thirty miles below the site of the first clash. English officials in Carolina blamed Spanish agents and priests, who had been offering freedom to any runaway who could reach Florida.

Daut uses the Trelawny Town articles as the model case of a bargain that colonial powers repeatedly offered to communities of the formerly enslaved. The British pardoned Captain Cudjoe and his men and granted them a full state of freedom within a bounded area. In exchange Cudjoe and those who came after him had to use their best efforts to take, kill or destroy any rebels anywhere on the island, alone or alongside colonial forces, and to help repel foreign invasion. A parallel treaty bound the Blue Mountain or Windward Maroons under Captain Quao in 1740 on the same terms. Daut sets these beside Enrique's peace with Spain to show a recurring colonial technique: freedom is granted retail, to one group, on condition that the group becomes the instrument of enslavement for everyone else. She notes Louverture himself later invoked the Jamaican comparison for his own position under France.