Toussaint marries a free black woman while he is still enslaved

Girard and Donnadieu reconstruct from parish and notarial records a first marriage that no earlier biography knew about. Cecile was a free black woman rather than a woman of mixed descent, and the union must have been solemnised in church because all the children were recorded as legitimate, which was unusual among the enslaved population. The marriage falls in or before the year their eldest child was born, when Toussaint was about eighteen, unless the children were legitimised retroactively later. Cecile was probably the sister of an elderly carriage driver at Haut-du-Cap named Tony, whose freedom she offered to buy, which suggests Toussaint inherited the driver's post from a relative in the customary way. Since slavery followed the mother under the code of 1685, the free status of all her children points either to early emancipations or to Cecile being free at the marriage, meaning a free woman married an enslaved man. Where this account departs from the standard one: Every earlier biography treats Suzanne as Toussaint's only wife; the article establishes an earlier marriage and three children by it.

Thornton points to the Jamaica revolt of 1760 as the nearest Caribbean analogy to the Haitian Revolution in size and scale of mobilisation, and notes that it was organised through Akan national organisations including an elected king and queen. He uses it to set up the two competing principles he sees in Saint-Domingue: the estate, headed by creole leadership and relying on plantation hierarchy for authority, and the nation, a looser but more popular form. Because colonial legislation in Saint-Domingue made open ceremony by national leadership illegal on security grounds, national leadership there was vested in the heads of secret societies, whose leaders were selected on a religious basis and served as orators and arbitrators. Neither principle could operate alone, he argues, since creoles could not stage a revolt without the mass of enslaved people behind them.

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.

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.