A madman predicts Charles Town will burn and the slaveholders listen anyway

Less than two years after the Stono Rebellion, in which people escaping slavery in South Carolina had fought their way toward Spanish Florida, Eliza Lucas Pinckney of Charles Town wrote to a neighbour on 11 March 1741. A man in the district had received a prophecy that the town and the country as far as Ponpon Bridge would be destroyed by fire and sword, the work carried out by enslaved people before the first of the following month. He rode sixty miles twice to warn the governor. Pinckney reports that nobody credited him and that everybody was frightened anyway, because of what such an idea might do once it was in the heads of the enslaved. In January 1742 she attended the trial of a man she owned, recorded as Mulatto Quash, one of several accused of planning to escape to St Augustine.

In 1741 the Conde das Galveas, viceroy of Brazil, sent the king a broadly positive report that ended with a warning about great illnesses sweeping Salvador, fluxes and people bleeding from the mouth. By the autumn of 1743 his tone had changed completely. More than five thousand people had sickened and died in recent years and the colony was in a terrible state. Jesuits at the Engenho de Santa Anna had already reported in the early 1730s that they could not cope with the number of sick around them. Galveas never wrote that these deaths were poisonings. In the same year as the alarming report he set in motion an ordinance on poison, which made administering it worth investigating even where nobody died, and required anyone selling poison to register with the state. Over the following decades denunciations to the Inquisition of causing or of treating such illnesses climbed rapidly.

King's explanatory mechanism for everything that follows is fiscal. From this decade the colonial administration attached increasingly heavy charges to acts of liberty, partly to raise revenue and partly to discourage manumission. Following Debien, King argues the taxes produced a class of people who were slaves in law and free in practice, known in the colony as libres de savane, bush freedmen. Their situations varied: some still owed regular payments to their former masters, others were entirely free of obligation. Many stayed near the plantation working provision grounds, some ran small businesses in the towns, and a few prospered. Business success sometimes but not always led to formal manumission afterwards. The category matters because it is where King places Toussaint, from at least 1785 and, on documents he has found, from before 1779.

When Agaja died in 1740 a report written at the time stated plainly that two of his sons were making war on each other over the succession. Other contemporary evidence shows that Tegbesu was the second son, was not the designated successor, and during his father's reign had no expectation of ruling and stayed out of his father's business. Within about thirty years the story had changed. Robert Norris, writing while Tegbesu was still on the throne, said the principal chiefs of Dahomey had chosen him unanimously over the designated heir, and that the disappointed elder brother then plotted to seize power, was detected and was executed. By the time the court historian Agbidinukun gave his account to a French official early in the twentieth century, Tegbesu had been formally named heir by his predecessor, and his brother's claim had become a rebellion against lawful authority. Law traces three Dahomian kings whose irregular accessions were rewritten in this way.