Priests in the French islands are told to excommunicate runaways

A regulation of discipline for the Negroes, addressed to the parish priests of the French islands of America, appeared in 1776 and 1777, at a point when flight from the plantations was rising sharply. Its prescriptions aim almost entirely at that. Marronnage is condemned outright, without regard to circumstances, as a capital vice. A runaway who repented faced public penance and permanent exclusion from communion, and one who refused faced excommunication. Like every ordinance arriving from the metropole, the text also called for a softening of slavery, on the reasoning that order and quiet were easier to keep that way. Within it the Church appears as the only force capable of tearing African custom out by the root. The Jesuits had already been expelled from the islands, and the reason was their practical solidarity with maroons, whom some of them defended openly and sheltered.

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.

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.

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.