Masonic lodges open in the colony and free black men are admitted

Several Masonic lodges were founded in Saint-Domingue around the middle of the eighteenth century, bringing with them a vocabulary of tolerance and of religion separated from the state. Freedmen joined, including some black men. Planters took care that Masonic doctrine did not get far, which is a polite way of saying they tolerated the lodges and starved them of influence. The traffic ran in an unexpected direction. Elements of Masonic ritual and imagery passed into the religion the enslaved population was assembling, alongside material from Catholic worship, and they can still be identified in it. Secret signs, grades of knowledge, the compass and the all-seeing eye turn up on temple walls and on altars. A brotherhood the colonists imported to give themselves a private civic life supplied part of the symbolic equipment of the cult they were trying to stamp out.

Cases heard by the Conseil Superieur of Martinique in 1755 and again in 1767 describe the same procedure. Enslaved people were lined up and touched with a branch of the medecinier, the tree also called the Barbados nut or purging nut, in one instance by a small child, and the guilty were expected to collapse in fits of convulsions and shouting. Slaveholders reporting these events told the court that everyone on the plantations held that contact with the branch would torment a poisoner. Pierre Clement de Laussat recorded the same use of medecinier branches in a diary entry in 1807. Eating the seeds causes vomiting and stomach pain, which Orfila noted in 1814, while touching the leaves and branches does nothing at all. The ritual worked through participation. It needed the whole community present, and the verdict it produced was one they had reached together.

Mocombe presents Makandal as an oungan from Guinea who turned religious authority into a weapon of war. Working at night, he and his followers burned estates, killed owners and, over roughly six years, poisoned as many as six thousand whites. The French captured him in 1758 and executed him publicly in the square of Cap-Francais, present day Cap-Haitien. The article treats the choice of a public square as deliberate: the colony needed spectators, because Makandal's power rested on the belief among the enslaved that he could not be killed. Mocombe places this in a wider argument that marronage was the most persistent form of refusal, and that maroons in the mountains were not simply fleeing but rebuilding African forms of production, worship and authority from which raids on the plains could be launched.

Governor William Henry Lyttelton of South Carolina marched into Cherokee country and took twenty-four Cherokee men as hostages, to be held at Fort Prince George until an equal number of others were handed over to him. Twenty-three were surrendered. He kept twenty-one of the hostages anyway, against further demands. Cherokee fighters then raided settlements along the South Carolina frontier and attacked the fort itself on 14 February 1760, and the garrison killed the hostages it was holding. Lyttelton had been given a formal welcome at Charleston five weeks before, on 8 January. Eliza Lucas Pinckney wrote that February that his was the first army ever to go up into that country, that he had acted with spirit, and that he had obtained what no Indians had granted before. A historian of the state later called the hostage-taking immoral and stupid.