Quacoe drinks the water that washed a corpse to prove his innocence

An enslaved woman named Quamina died in 1775 on a Suriname plantation after weeks of pain in her belly. Everyone on the estate went together to the overseer, H. C. Dorfeld, accused Quacoe of poisoning her and asked that he be put in irons. Quacoe was the head carpenter and, judging from the letter Dorfeld sent the court, a healer too; the others believed he could have cured Quamina and had refused. At the funeral in the slave quarters the crowd ran behind the coffin and flung it against Quacoe's door. They searched his house for evidence and found none. They washed the body and gave him the water to drink, on the understanding that a guilty man would die of it, and he drank it willingly. Later four men beat him, joined by several young women with sticks, and he reached the main house covered in blood. The court punished the four and let Quacoe go.

Les Affiches Americaines was the newspaper of Saint-Domingue, the French colony that became Haiti. It began in 1766 and stopped in 1791, and across those twenty five years it printed notices placed by owners whose enslaved workers had left them. Each notice tried to make one person findable again, so it recorded height, scars, teeth and clothing, the languages the person spoke and the way they talked, supposed habits of character, and the people they were thought to visit. Nowhere else in the paperwork of the colony do so many enslaved people appear as separate individuals. The same press carried a second kind of document, the lists drawn up by jails naming those who had been recaptured. One fairly complete run of the paper survives in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. From it, 10,772 advertisements and 6,535 jail lists have since been transcribed, which makes the newspaper the largest single record of flight from slavery in Saint-Domingue.

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.

When the French government drew its colonial slave law together in 1685, it also stated that Africans who reached France as slaves could become free under French law and custom and could not be forced back to the West Indies. Owners found ways around it. A decree of 1716 let planters register enslaved people as having been brought over for education, which blocked their freedom claims. Read alongside the remnants of serfdom, that reasoning allowed four thousand enslaved people to be kept in France in 1738. Later, labour shortage in the colonies moved the government to order them shipped back, even though they returned carrying a spirit of independence. In 1777 a royal decree closed France to black and mixed race people, free and enslaved alike, allowing a West Indian owner only one personal servant while travelling. The stated reason was the well-being of the colonies. The following year a decree forbade black and white marriages in France.