Romaine Riviere buys his own family and then marries their mother

On 10 August 1785 Romaine Riviere paid six thousand livres to a planter called Rene Guindet for an enslaved woman of about forty three years, Marie Roze Adam, and her three children. The children were his own. Louis-Marie was eleven, Pierre-Marie was nine and Marie-Jeanne was seven, which places Riviere in Saint-Domingue from 1772 at the latest. Twelve days later, on 22 August, Father Sauvage married him to Marie Roze in the church of Saint Rose de Lima at Leogane, and the purchase became a manumission. The bride brought clothes, jewellery and other goods valued at nine hundred livres. Each of the three children carried a name of the Virgin. That bears on what came afterwards. When Riviere declared himself the godson of the Virgin Mary in 1791, he was drawing on a devotion the parish records show he had held for at least twenty years, which weakens the old charge that he invented a religion in order to raise an army.

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.

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.

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.