Freed by his master, Toussaint rents land and thirteen slaves

Girard reconstructs Louverture's life before 1791 from the awkward parts. He was a coachman on the Breda plantation, spared field labour, given some education by his master though he remained partly illiterate and wrote in a mixture of French and Creole. In 1776, years before any general emancipation, his master freed him voluntarily. He then rented a few acres together with the thirteen enslaved people who came with the land and set up as a planter. Girard observes that he spent the rest of his life reminding other black people that he had been born in slavery and not that he had also been a free man living off slave labour. He adds a detail that fits the pattern, that when the revolt broke out in 1791 Louverture's first act was to take his former master to safety, and only then did he join the rebellion, as a veterinarian.

Between 1750 and 1791 the slave owners of Saint-Domingue lived in fear. A great many of them died of poisoning, and the colonial police could make nothing of it. Selling or preparing suspicious drugs was banned, African magic was banned, and neither prohibition touched the problem. Out of the maroon camps came leaders with reputations for power who announced that the whites would be exterminated and the enslaved set free. Some of them were politicians in every practical sense, working out how independence might actually be won. Their means were the ones available: knowledge of poisonous plants, prepared potions, and charms called garde-corps, body guards, given to rebellious slaves and said to make them proof against weapons and free of any fear of white people. What frightened the planters was that the two things came together. The pharmacology worked and the political programme was serious, and the colony had no answer to either.

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.

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.