Jean-Pierre Boyer is born

Boyer was born on 15 February 1776 to a French tailor and an enslaved woman. He reunified north and south in 1820 after Christophe's death, occupied Santo Domingo in 1822 and held it for twenty two years, and in 1825 accepted France's indemnity demand under the guns of a fleet at Port-au-Prince. He ruled for twenty three years and was overthrown in 1843 by the rural population his own agrarian policy had ground down. I want his birth on the timeline rather than only his 1825 signature, because the signature gets treated as a single bad day and it was not. It was the end point of a career built on holding a state together by concession, and by 1825 he had already spent every other option he had. Understanding that is different from forgiving it.

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 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.