Moving the high court to Port-au-Prince sets north against west

Beard locates the first crack in white colonial power in an administrative decision. In 1787 the Superior Council sitting at Cap Francais was suppressed and its authority handed to the council at Port-au-Prince under a single colonial title. The mechanism was rivalry between the two great port cities, each the centre of its own planter interest, and the transfer gave the west a legal supremacy the north would not accept. Appeals went to France, which listened and did nothing. Deputies were sent to Paris, where resident colonial proprietors organised a club to block them from being heard by the States General. Beard's point is that the planters wrecked their own united front at the worst possible moment, just as antislavery sentiment was gathering force in Britain and France, and that their quarrels taught the enslaved that white authority was neither united nor invincible.

In 1785, acting on a denunciation, police raided a house near Cachoeira in Bahia where six people had gathered, all of whom said they were Jeje, a Brazilian term for people born in the Gbe speaking region of the Bight of Benin. Their leader, Sebastiao de Guerra, had been accused of sorcery once before and was publicly known for curing charms, dancing calundus and leading worship in the Jeje language. What the police carried away differed from what earlier raids had produced. Alongside small calabashes holding ingredients for spells there were buried objects and an arrangement of leaves, and leaves were central to the worship of the vodun, to initiation and to medicinal baths in the Bight of Benin. The gathering looked less like a healing consultation and more like a shrine with offerings and a congregation. Historians read the case as an early moment in the formation of Candomble as an institution.

The first population figures Oostindie treats as reliable date from 1789 and give a total of almost twenty-one thousand. Of these, 12,864 were enslaved, 3,714 were free people of colour and 4,410 were white, the white group itself split by a census into 2,469 Protestants, 1,095 Sephardic Jews and 846 servants of unstated religion. Oostindie's point is that this was an atypical Caribbean colony: no tropical export staple, a free trade harbour, and an unusually large free non-white population. Roughly a hundred thousand Africans had been landed on Curaçao across the Dutch period, mostly between 1667 and 1730, with the last imports in the 1770s, so the enslaved population was already heavily locally born. By the time slavery ended in the Dutch West Indies in 1863 the enslaved number had fallen to 5,498.

Measuring rebellions by the number of people involved, Geggus finds that no mainland American revolt appears to have mobilised more than a thousand enslaved people, and that only the Louisiana rising of 1811 passed a hundred in North America. The West Indies and Guianas produced eight or nine that reached a thousand or more. Within that group the rising on the northern plain of Saint-Domingue is in a class of its own for magnitude, length and outcome, and it triggered further revolts elsewhere in the colony, at Leogane and Jacmel and on the Cul de Sac plain in early 1792, at Anse a Veau and on the Cayes plain the same year, and possibly in the Artibonite. He notes that in the biggest cases historians stop counting armed men and start estimating everyone living in rebel held ground, which makes the figures soft.