Taxing manumission makes people free in fact but not in law

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.

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.

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.

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.