Makandal leaps out of the fire in front of the church at Cap-Francais

Arrested in 1758 and sentenced to burn, Makandal was taken to the square in front of the church at Cap-Francais. Accounts agree that he got clear of the flames, in front of a crowd that had come to watch him die. He was retaken and executed shortly afterwards. What the colony remembered was the leap. Haitian painters have returned to the scene since, showing the rebellious slave with magical powers astonishing the spectators, and the episode went on troubling masters and administrators for years after the man himself was ash. For the enslaved population the reading was straightforward: fire did not hold him, so the power he claimed was real, and the authorities that had promised a public death had failed to deliver one in front of witnesses. Executions are performed in order to be seen. This one was seen, and it taught the opposite of what it was staged to teach.

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.

Makandal was an African born man who lost an arm working on a sugar plantation of the northern plain and kept a lifelong grudge against his former masters. He claimed powers drawn from a mixture of Islam, Christianity and African religion, and after running away in 1751 he organised a wide conspiracy to poison French colonists and their livestock, which Girard says killed thousands. He was said to be able to turn into a mosquito and fly off when cornered. In 1758 the French caught him and tied him to a stake at Cap Francais, and as the flames rose he broke loose of the pole, at which the enslaved people in the crowd cried out that he had escaped. The authorities cleared the square and put him back in the fire. As late as 1791 many still believed he was alive and would return to call a day of reckoning.

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.