Makandal is executed in the square after a six-year poisoning campaign

Mocombe treats marronage as the most successful and persistent form of resistance, consisting of people leaving the plantations for the mountains and forests where they reconstituted African ways of life, and raiding from there. His central example is Makandal, whom he identifies as a Vodou priest from Guinea. Over a rebellion he dates at six years, Makandal and his followers attacked plantations at night, burning them and killing owners, and poisoned and killed as many as six thousand whites. The French captured him and executed him publicly in the town square. Mocombe places this in a longer line of resistance that includes poisoning masters and infanticide committed to spare children the conditions of slavery, and treats Makandal as the direct predecessor of Boukman Dutty, another priest, three decades later. Mocombe stresses that the maroons raided from their retreats and often came down at night to poison or kill, so that flight and attack were part of one strategy.

The most famous poison case in the French Caribbean ended in 1758 with the execution of Makandal in Saint Domingue. The charge that carried it was sacrilege, and the object at its centre was a tied up bundle of power containing a crucifix. Bundles like it were made across the Atlantic world and their contents can be listed from trial records: grave dirt, animal horns used both for cupping and for binding other objects together, feathers, herbs, and in the Portuguese colonies pieces of consecrated host, papers bearing the names of saints, and small crosses. Christian material inside such a bundle was what colonial courts found intolerable, and cases described as sacrilegious were the ones the Lisbon Inquisition proved most willing to bring to trial. The papers on Makandal, letters and interrogations running from 1757 to 1759, were gathered together by Moreau de Saint-Mery and sit in a single box in the French colonial archive.

Geggus offers what he calls a minimum tally of about a hundred and eighty incidents of slave rebellion and conspiracy across the Americas, and argues that the 1790s stand out as the period of peak intensity, with 1795 possibly unique for the number of separate incidents in different societies. His appendix lists Curaçao twice in January and August of that year alongside Coro, Pointe Coupée in Louisiana, Nassau, Puerto Principe, Aguadilla, Demerara, Aruba, Buenos Aires, Trinidad, Bayamo and Samaná. He notes that the rough parity between Brazil with twenty-seven incidents and the United States with twenty-five is probably an artefact of the American supply of local newspapers rather than of slave behaviour. Only the 1811 rising in the Louisiana territory mobilised more than a hundred slaves in North America, while the West Indies and Guianas produced at least eight or nine risings of a thousand or more. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus rejects Eugene Genovese's schema in which the French Revolution produced a new revolutionary type of slave uprising superseding earlier restorationist ones, on the ground that Genovese never supplied a plausible example of the new type.

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.