A new manager blames a cattle plague on the slaves of Haut-du-Cap

The article reconstructs a crisis on the Bréda estate at Haut-du-Cap that may hold the key to Toussaint's freedom. Accused of overspending, the manager Bayon de Libertat was replaced by a man named Delribal just as a cattle epidemic broke out. Convinced the slaves had caused the blight, Delribal harassed them cruelly and the rate of running away climbed. He was eventually dismissed, Bayon de Libertat was reinstated, the epidemic subsided and the runaways came back. Toussaint is not named in the surviving papers, but he specialised in the care of animals and would have been at the centre of the trouble. The authors suggest that a prominent Creole slave who helped bring runaways back to work would have earned the gratitude of the comte de Noé, who was visiting from his own estate and who could have asked the legal owner for his emancipation.

From 1775 until the rising of 1791, ships landed 301,320 people from Africa in Saint Domingue. West Central Africa and Saint Helena accounted for 143,181 of them, about forty seven and a half per cent, far ahead of the Bight of Benin with 56,198. Sixteen years is short enough that a large share of the people alive in the colony in 1791 had come through that trade and had been born on the other side of the ocean. No other French Caribbean colony looked like this. Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana all saw their West Central African share fall in the same years. Saint Domingue was the only French colony where the number from that region rose and stayed the largest group right up to the revolt, and it was the only French colony where the enslaved population rose in force and won.

Between 1775 and 1791 Guadeloupe received 2,271 people from Africa. Only 287 of them, thirteen per cent, came from West Central Africa, which left that region fourth behind the Bight of Biafra, the category the database calls Other Africa, and the Bight of Benin. A quarter century earlier West Central Africa had been the largest supplier to Guadeloupe. Martinique shows the same fall, from twenty eight per cent in the years to 1775 down to twenty per cent afterwards, on small numbers. French Guiana fell furthest, to 220 people out of 2,722. In the same sixteen years Saint Domingue took 143,181 from that one region. The contrast is the whole point of the comparison. Every French Caribbean colony had enslaved people and none of the others produced a revolution, and Saint Domingue was the only one whose arrivals were overwhelmingly and increasingly from a single African region.

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.