Tegbesu has the merchants of Whydah killed and takes their trade

Tegbesu came to the throne of Dahomey in 1740. Around the beginning of 1746 he ordered the execution of the men then trading at Whydah and put the business in the hands of the Migan and the Mehu, the two highest ranking officials of the kingdom, each of whom kept two or three servants at the port for the purpose. A French agent on the spot gave two reasons. The king wanted the dead men's property, and he wanted to do all of the trade himself. A slightly later report says simply that he killed them because they were too rich. The same agent noted that the new appointees did not dare trade on their own account for fear of ending the same way, and that nothing could now be sold at Whydah except through them. Whether the executed men were private traders or royal officials who had enriched themselves is not clear from the record.

In 1748 the Virginia legislature made it a felony for an enslaved person to practise medicine of any kind, on pain of death. The act said that many slaves, under pretence of practising physic, had prepared and given out poisonous medicines, and described the resulting illnesses as long and tedious indispositions sometimes ending in death, which is exactly how the earlier accusations had described them. Two provisions softened the sentence. If the court decided there had been no ill intent and no bad consequence it could impose something lighter, in practice a brand on the hand and thirty nine lashes. And the law did not apply where all the owners concerned had agreed to the treatment. Contemporary English law held that poisoning could never be manslaughter because it carried its own evidence of deliberate malice. Virginia dropped the requirement of harm or intent altogether, which let county courts punish people for what they might do.

In May 1745 Governor Mauricius wrote that poison was one of the greatest troubles in the country and that the executions were not answering, because this population did not fear death or even the most wretched torments. Beheading, burning at the stake and breaking on the wheel had all been tried. The Society believed the condemned expected to return to their homelands after death. So in December 1745 it issued a short ordinance that changed the punishment rather than the definition of the crime. Anyone convicted of poisoning another slave or livestock would have the tongue cut out and the forehead branded, and would work in chains at Fort Amsterdam, secluded, without communication or meeting, so that they should never form a community. The target was the network. At least three men suffered it. The practice was dropped after that decade, and cases involving practitioners and their networks ran on for another thirty years.

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.