The Conseil Superieur expels the Jesuits from the colony

On 24 November 1763 the Conseil Superieur of Saint Domingue had the Jesuits expelled from the colony. The order followed years of hostility from the lay authorities. Catholic clergy owned slaves like everyone else, but they had a reputation for more kindness and humanity in their dealings with them, and the Jesuits in particular were accused of pushing the work gangs towards desertion and revolt. Behind the charge lay the awkward logic of the Code Noir. Baptism required instruction, instruction required priests, and priests moving through the plantations meant witnesses the planters preferred to do without. Expelling the order removed the witnesses and left the legal duty of Christianisation standing on paper. What followed shaped Haitian religion. Africans went on being baptised without being taught, kept their own beliefs whole behind an official conversion, and organised their worship at night in the woods, where the secret societies of the colony took form.

From the 1740s there was no priest living even in Soyo and rarely more than one anywhere in the Kongo. In 1763 the Marquis de Pombal, Portugal's anticlerical chief minister, barred Italian Capuchins from sailing out of Lisbon. Through most of the period of his power the country's only missionary was Cherubino da Savona, who spent fourteen unbroken years there, travelled almost every province, and reported baptising more than seven hundred thousand people, plausible in a place where a whole population expected infant baptism as a matter of identity. His report of 1774 rates the provinces. Soyo was still almost entirely Christian and its prince, Dom Miguel Castro da Sylva, could read and write Portuguese, though the churches were ruins whose sites were kept swept. In Mbamba the duke paid three teachers and gathered his vassals every Saturday for the catechism. In Nsundi, the oldest Christian province, the people were now almost all pagan.

Enslaved people rose against the Dutch in Berbice on the Guyana coast in 1749 and again in 1752, and both risings were put down harshly. From 1762 to 1767 a far larger revolt aimed at something else. It set out to turn the whole colony into a free black state, which would have carried consequences for Surinam, Demerara and Essequibo alongside it. In ambition and in what it achieved, it was second only to the revolution that later took Saint-Domingue. That distinction matters. Most slave risings in the Americas involved the people of one plantation or one district and often prepared the way for flight into the bush. A revolt aimed at an entire colony required planning across estates and a plan for what came after victory. Cartagena in 1599 and 1600, Jamaica in 1760, and Berbice belong to that smaller and more dangerous category.

From the late 1750s the enslaved people of New Orleans gathered every Sunday on an open piece of ground behind the city to trade and to enjoy themselves. They were Bambara, Mandingo, Wolof, Fulbe, Fon and Yoruba, and they were joined by free people of colour and by Native Americans. The site had been used for the corn feasts of the Houma before the French came. It was known as the Place des Negres and later as Congo Square. What went on there was drumming and dancing performed in public by hundreds of people of African descent, the bamboula, the calinda, the coujaille and the pile chactas, all of them related to Vodou rites, and it was the market where the charms called gris gris were sold. The word comes from Mende, spoken by Mandingo and Bambara people. No other place in the United States let African religion be performed so openly for so long.