Romaine Riviere buys thirty two acres at Trou Coffy

In July 1784 a free black man recorded as Romain Riviere bought ten carreaux of land, roughly thirty two acres, at Trou Coffy in the hills above Leogane in Saint-Domingue. The seller was a free man of colour named Maurice Cavalier and the price was four thousand livres in money and animals. For scale, a newly landed African man was then sold in the colony for between eighteen hundred and twenty five hundred livres. The deed lists no buildings and no planted fields, so what he bought was ground he would clear himself for coffee. His marriage contract the following year describes him as a habitant holding forty carreaux at Trou Coffy, which suggests that the ten adjoined thirty he already had. He also owned at least two enslaved people, two horses and furniture. Seven years later the same man, as Romaine-la-Prophetesse, would command thousands of insurgents from that hillside and take the towns of Leogane and Jacmel.

Ottobah Cugoano was captured and enslaved, worked on Caribbean plantations, and came to London in the middle of the eighteenth century with the man who owned him. There he wrote a critique of slavery that starts from a different place than the abolitionist argument around him. In the late eighteenth century he described the imperial organisation of the slave trade and the triangular Atlantic economy it belonged to. His conception of sovereignty considers people first and institutions afterwards. No human being has the right to enslave another, and therefore the task is to build institutions that cannot do it, rather than to reform the state so that it complies on paper while surviving intact. He named the Atlantic nations whose internal quarrels set the rules of that trade, Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England, and observed that Africans and the peoples of the Americas were not consulted about any of it.

Nine slave ships sailed from Le Havre in 1783 for the Loango coast, all of them bound for Saint-Domingue. Their names were L'Homme Instruit, L'Apollon, Le Neree, Le Roi Maure, La Marthe, L'Agamemnon, Le Prince Noir, Le Jason and Le Jeune Frederic. The armament records give three figures for each vessel: how many people it bought in Africa, how many died at sea, how many were put ashore in the colony. Together the nine bought 3,722 people. 458 died on the crossing. 3,264 were landed in Saint-Domingue. Le Jeune Frederic, which left on 25 September, bought 328 and lost 115 of them, more than a third. Le Neree lost 17 out of 432. Le Havre was one port among several, since Nantes and Dunkirk were fitting out for the same African coast in the same years. Loango lies north of the Congo river, and its people were the largest single group in the colony that became Haiti.

The Portuguese missionary Rafael de Castello de Vide served in Kongo through the 1780s, witnessed and denounced the export of captives, and sought to persuade the king of Kongo to ban the sale of enslaved people outside the country. Thornton uses his eyewitness reports to connect two things usually kept apart. A long round of Kongo civil war began in 1779, first setting partisans of King Pedro V against those of José I, then breaking out again on the death of José's brother and successor Afonso V. French and English shippers were buying along what they called the coast of Angola, with the region around Loango as the main base, and Vili merchants brought captives from inland to Cabinda, Malemba and Loango. Thornton estimates some sixty-two thousand Kongolese exported in the decade after 1780, more than half the combined French and English Angola trade.