Coffee triples in ten years and Britain takes the island at the peace

Coffee reached the Caribbean in the second quarter of the eighteenth century and suited land the sugar planters had left alone. It grew on slopes and it took heavy rain. In Dominica the number of coffee trees went from 684,700 in 1743 to 1,367,700 in 1749 and 1,585,400 in 1753. Over the same decade the enslaved population tripled and the number of white residents doubled. By 1763, when France gave the island up at the Peace of Paris, annual output stood at 1,690,360 pounds, so what France ceded to Britain was in effect a coffee colony. The consequence held for seventy years. In the early 1800s Dominica was the only British Caribbean possession where a majority of enslaved people worked coffee, and it had the lowest share working in sugar anywhere in that empire. At the abolition of slavery in 1833 coffee still brought in about half of the island's export earnings.

Francois Makandal, a Muslim from Guinea, became the best known of the maroon leaders in 1757. He prophesied that the white masters would be wiped out. He spread terror among them by preparing poisons that killed slowly, and he supplied rebellious slaves with talismans called garde-corps, which were held to make the wearer invulnerable to weapons and to remove all fear of white people. Several groups of maroons were said to be under his command. His name outlived him in the language of the colony. Makandal became the general word in Saint-Domingue for a talisman or a poison, and later for the ceremonies in which such charms were made. That linguistic afterlife is the measure of what he achieved. A man who has been executed can still be a working category in the vocabulary of the people who executed him, and every planter who used the word was repeating his name without meaning to.

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.

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.