A white father refuses to acknowledge a son he thinks too dark

Bellegarde opens the life with an act of rejection. Petion was born at Port-au-Prince to a woman of colour and a white man, Pascal Sabes, who judged the child's complexion too dark and declined to recognise him. His schooling was poor because the whites had built no schools in the colony. He learned silversmithing from a friend of his father, Guiole of Bordeaux, whose wife looked after him and called him pichoun, her southern dialect for my little one, and out of that endearment came the name he eventually took as his own. Falling in with the non-commissioned officers of the Port-au-Prince garrison, he developed an interest in soldiering and particularly in artillery, and joined the militia at eighteen. Bellegarde builds his whole portrait on this beginning: a man excluded by colour who spent his life legislating against exclusion. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

Between 1750 and 1775 the sources of Saint Domingue's captive population shifted decisively. Of 218,800 people recorded as landed in the colony in those years, 122,586 came from West Central Africa and Saint Helena, fifty six per cent of the total. The Bight of Benin supplied 52,911 and Senegambia and the offshore Atlantic 8,991, which no longer even made it the third largest source. Earlier in the century the balance had run the other way, with Senegambia a leading supplier and West Central Africa a distant third. Two developments explain the reversal. Governments in the Senegambia region grew stronger and more centralised and shut down the raiding that had fed the market there. In the Kongo region kingship stayed fractured and armed force remained the ordinary way of settling political disputes, so the flow of captives grew as the region came apart.

Poison prosecutions in Virginia were rare before the law of 1748: five cases in the whole stretch from 1730 to 1748. Then they climbed to thirty in the 1750s, fifty six in the 1760s and sixty five in the 1770s, before dropping to twenty three in the 1780s. Across the eighteenth century more enslaved people were tried in Virginia for poisoning than for any crime except theft. After 1748 the phrase poisonous medicines, which had appeared in neither law nor cases before that year, turns up in a majority of them until the end of the century, and the number of cases naming no victim at all rose in step with it. Of the twenty seven cases in Brunswick and Cumberland counties in these decades, just over half involved medical practitioners. The statute that created the offence created the wave of prosecutions that followed it.

Spanish commercial policy had long kept Santo Domingo poor, taxing and restricting the dealings that its colonists conducted with their French neighbours and with foreign ships. When Charles III came to the Spanish throne and liberalised colonial trade, the colony's economy began to move. Traders from several nations found their way to its coasts. Jose Gabriel Garcia, writing in the 1870s, singled out the 1770s under Brigadier Jose Solano as the happiest and most fortunate stretch of the whole colonial period he was describing. The improvement was brief. Within twenty years the revolution in the French part of the island had begun, and the concern of officials in Santo Domingo shifted from controlling smuggling to keeping revolutionary ideas out. Garcia treated the whole episode as proof of his own liberal argument, that Santo Domingo suffered from Spanish protectionism and prospered whenever Spain relaxed its grip.