Geggus moves Toussaint's manumission back to the early 1770s

Geggus reopens the question of when and by whom Toussaint was freed. Debien, Menier and Fouchard had settled on 1776 from a marriage register entry of September 1777 concerning an African formerly belonging to Toussaint Breda, with a margin note referring to a legal manumission in 1776. Geggus reads that note as applying to the African bridegroom rather than to his former owner, since the priest was obliged to verify the groom's status and not the seller's, and adds that Toussaint could hardly have been freed, bought a slave and freed him again inside a year. His own reconstruction is that Bayon de Libertat freed Toussaint some time in the early 1770s, having bought him before becoming the count's attorney at the end of 1772, which explains the silence of the Breda correspondence. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus rejects the 1776 manumission date accepted by Debien, Menier and Fouchard, arguing the document frees an African bridegroom rather than Toussaint himself.

A French mission worked in the kingdoms of Loango and Kakongo north of the river Zaire from 1766 to 1775. The Capuchins had never reached those societies and they had stayed non-Christian, yet the French kept running into individual Christians, enslaved people and traders originally from Soyo, who were delighted to meet a priest. In 1773 a man named Pedro came to tell them that a whole group of Soyo Christians had migrated across the river years before and were living in Kakongo under their own head, Dom Iouan. The prefect went with him to their settlement at Manguenzo, was met by the community, saw the great cross standing in the middle of the village, and went into the chapel to pray while the people sang. In a week the visitors baptised several hundred children. When they came back later to live there they were disappointed and left.

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.

The First Carib War began when the British settlement commissioners started surveying and selling land on the windward, or eastern, half of St Vincent, which was the heart of Carib territory. The Caribs knew the mountains and the fighting went badly for the British troops, who were held up and could not force a decision. British forces did take some ground. In 1773 the Caribs agreed to a peace treaty that cut their land holdings by two thousand acres and declared them subjects of the British Crown. Two decades of pressure followed on their movement, their planting grounds and their freedom to trade. The treaty settled nothing except the arithmetic of acreage. In 1795 the same population, with the same knowledge of the same mountains, began a second war that took the British three years and a deliberate campaign of starvation to end.