Salvador reports five thousand dead and then writes a poison law

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.

Over the summer of 1742, after torture, an enslaved man named Baron confessed to causing his mistress's death. He said he had bought herbs from Abraham on another plantation, meaning to cool her temper and avoid future punishment rather than to kill. He also named Coffij, who belonged to the Society of Suriname itself. Coffij denied it and gave the court Askaan and Emanuiel for poisoning other enslaved people, which produced their trials, and Emanuiel's trial produced Ajuba's. Baron additionally accused Louis, a driver on his own plantation, of going about with poison, and Louis's case produced Sambo's. Suriname had sixteen poison cases in the whole of the 1730s and forty two between 1740 and the end of 1745, and eighteen of the forty two were tied to another case. Baron, Sambo, Abraham and Emanuiel were branded, pinched with hot tongs until they died, and their heads set on spikes in the Suriname river.

Beard makes two claims about Toussaint that carry the whole argument of the book. The first is racial: he wants it emphatically marked that Toussaint had no white blood at all, because the point of the biography is to show that everything Toussaint achieved was achieved with faculties common to the African race. The second is biographical: Toussaint lived fifty years of his life in slavery before he emerged as the vindicator of his people. Beard treats the long wait as an advantage, giving the man time to learn both the sufferings and the capacities of the enslaved before he had to act. Modern archival work on the Breda estate papers, including the study by Geggus in this same batch, has since established that Toussaint was legally free and had himself owned a slave well before 1791. Where this account departs from the standard one: Beard presents Toussaint as enslaved until the revolution, which archival research on the Breda papers has since overturned.

Toussaint was born on 20 May 1743 at Bréda in the northern plain and he was manumitted in 1776, at thirty three. Then he stayed. He worked as a free man on and around the same estate for fifteen more years, rented land, kept livestock, and at one point held enslaved people himself. That last fact gets left out of the hero version and it should not be, because it tells you he understood the system from the inside of both of its ledgers. He was forty eight when the north rose in 1791, which made him old for a war. The literacy, the coachman's knowledge of the road network, the veterinary knowledge, the relationships with both plantation managers and field workers, none of that came from the revolution. He walked in with it, and it is why he ended up commanding rather than following.