Toussaint Louverture is born on the Bréda plantation

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.

In October 1741 the Conseil Superieur of Martinique told Paris that the deaths of enslaved people and livestock came from particular slaves misusing medical knowledge, making powders and drugs from plants and handing them round as remedies. It warned that such practitioners might turn their skills on owners, argued that medicine could not be told apart from poisoning because the composition was kept secret, and said other slaves would never denounce them for fear of becoming victims. It concluded that slaves should be barred from giving any remedies, powders or drugs for any illness. Before the royal answer came, the court had to deal with Jean Francois, who admitted in January 1742 to distributing remedies across many quarters of the island. No accusation of harm could be found, and with no law the court could not execute him, so it argued about irons and deportation. The royal declaration arrived on 1 February 1743 on precisely the terms requested.

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.