A letter records the deaths that orphaned Toussaint at thirty

Following Toussaint's own statements, historians have written that his father was alive and aged a hundred and five in 1802. A letter from the manager of Haut-du-Cap to the estate's owner reports instead that the plantation had lost the woman Pauline and her husband Hippolyte, both dead of a chest complaint, leaving five Creole children behind. Toussaint was therefore orphaned in his early thirties. The authors explain the discrepancy by the wider Haitian and Beninese usage in which father can mean a spiritual or surrogate father, and identify the man Toussaint meant as his godfather Pierre Baptiste, the elderly gatekeeper of the plantation whom he supported and always called his father. Toussaint may also have wanted distance from a man who was a reminder of his African birth. Baptiste survived until a few months after Toussaint's deportation and was then drowned by the French army. Where this account departs from the standard one: Toussaint told his captors in 1802 that his father was still living at a hundred and five; the plantation correspondence shows both parents died in 1774.

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.

In 1774 the Lisbon Inquisition issued a regulation that demoted the wearing of protective pouches and other sorcery practices to ignorance, and called those who made them manifest imposters. The effect in Bahia was immediate. Accusations had already been falling since the mid 1760s, and the last report of feiticaria in the prosecutor's notebooks appears in 1778. Feiticaria did not stop happening. The Inquisition had announced that it no longer wished to hear about it, and denunciations collapsed across the last quarter of the century. The change ran alongside the reforms pressed by the Marques de Pombal, secretary of state from 1750 to 1777, who wanted a strong central state and weaker church institutions and thought the empire backward. The Inquisition itself was dissolved in 1821. What had been a crime worth an Atlantic crossing and a full trial became, within a generation, something officially beneath notice.