Plantation lists make Congos the largest group in every region of the colony

David Geggus worked through seventy five surviving plantation inventories from Saint Domingue, covering roughly fifteen thousand enslaved people and recording ethnicity, age and sex. Among the African born on sugar estates, the group the records call Congos was the largest in all three regions of the colony. They were 43.5 per cent in the North between 1777 and 1791, 36.3 per cent in the South between 1771 and 1791, and 32.4 per cent in the West between 1773 and 1791. The North was where the rising of 1791 began. The label needs care. John Thornton warns that Congo was used loosely and served the French and the colonial upper class as a term of contempt for the African born. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall notes that the same people were recorded as Congos in French and Spanish colonies and as Angolans in British ones.

Dahomey paid an annual tribute to the Yoruba empire of Oyo for most of a century. Archibald Dalzel, drawing on Lionel Abson who ran the English fort at Whydah for over thirty years, described what happened when the envoys came to collect and Kpengla's second minister, the Meu, died. The envoys demanded a hundred of the dead man's women. Kpengla handed over some to be rid of them, and three months later the king of Oyo threatened invasion unless he received the rest. Rather than give up more Dahomean women, Kpengla sent troops into neighbouring Agouna to seize the number required. They were beaten back with heavy losses. Hearing this at midday, the king put on his cartridge box, shouldered his firelock and marched on Agouna at the head of eight hundred armed women. The enemy fled. Dalzel dated this to 1781, and documents show the Meu died in early 1779.

Soulouque was born enslaved at Petit-Goâve on 15 August 1782. In 1847 the milat elite in the Senate picked him as president precisely because they read him as a compliant black officer they could work around. He then purged them, consolidated real power, crowned himself Emperor Faustin I, and ran the country for a decade behind a paramilitary force called the zinglins. Look at that sequence and then look at 1957, when a different elite backed a mild country doctor for the same reason and got the Tonton Macoutes. This is what I mean when I say the timeline should sit entries next to each other rather than only under each other. Soulouque and Duvalier are one hundred and ten years apart and they are the same play run twice, and you only see it when the two entries are on the same screen.

Audubon was born on 26 April 1785 at Les Cayes, the illegitimate son of a French sugar planter and a French servant woman. He was taken to France as a child as the colony destabilized and later sent to the United States to avoid Napoleon's conscription. He became the defining ornithological artist in American history, and almost nobody who owns a print knows the man was born in Haiti. I keep him here for one reason. The diaspora is usually narrated as something that starts in 1915, or 1957, or 1991, and it starts before the country does. Saint-Domingue exported people to Louisiana, to Cuba, to Philadelphia, to Charleston and to France for decades before independence, and the cultural residue of that scattering is sitting in American museums under captions that mention no island at all.