Nobody can yet say who freed Toussaint or when

The single most important revision in Toussaint scholarship came in 1977, when Debien, Fouchard and Menier showed he was already free long before the slave revolt and had owned and rented slaves. Girard and Donnadieu accept the fact and reopen the date. The 1776 dating rested on a marginal notation, and Geggus has argued convincingly that the note refers to another person, suggesting instead an emancipation as early as the beginning of the decade, which would explain why Toussaint does not appear in the Bréda plantation records that begin in 1772. Toussaint himself said only that a heavy burden had been lifted from him twenty years before he wrote in 1797, and named the estate manager Bayon de Libertat as the man who freed him, though as manager rather than owner he had no legal power to do so. No manumission deed has been found. Where this account departs from the standard one: The article treats the widely cited 1776 emancipation date as unproven and leaves the year open between the early 1770s and 1777.

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.

Prince Hall was born in Barbados about 1738 and was enslaved in Boston. He was manumitted in 1770 and sought acceptance within white American Freemasonry, which refused him. Within ten years he had established African Freemasonry as a social structure of its own, and it still bears his name. The refusal and the reply together are the shape of the thing. A free Black man in revolutionary Massachusetts could not enter the institution that organised the civic life of free men, so he constructed it a second time alongside the first, with its own lodges, its own charters and its own line of succession. The order became one of the oldest continuously working Black institutions in the United States and a network by which Black men in distant cities knew and vouched for one another. Hall died in 1807. He was the most notable of the Caribbean born figures in early Black America.

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.