Nantes closes its books on colonial debts it will never collect

On 31 December 1792 the Nantes house of Chaurand ruled off the accounts of eight fully documented slaving voyages. After the initial payments they had expected 2.8 million livres from buyers in the French Caribbean. They were credited with 2.3 million, about eighty two per cent of it. Holding back a slice of the price had become ordinary practice among colonial buyers, and roughly a tenth of the money owed was never handed over at all. Across the port as a whole, people in the colonies owed the Nantes traders something like 45 million livres arising from the previous decade of slaving alone, divided between deliveries still under way, deliveries of the last three years and older debts. That is close to three quarters of the 63 million livres the Nantes houses afterwards recorded as lost through the Haitian Revolution. Rather than put fresh money into the islands the traders began taking over the management and then the ownership of plantations that could not pay them.

With almost no navy in the region, the Convention fell back in January 1793 on licensing privateers. Girard reports the results as a bargain for the Republic, with corsairs operating out of Guadeloupe alone taking about eighteen hundred prizes between 1794 and 1798 at minimal cost to the treasury. The practice also advertised the regime's principles, since many crews included black sailors and at least fifteen captains are known to have been black. He sets against this the British counterpoint. The Royal Navy made a policy of selling captured black privateers into slavery and operated under the punitive Articles of War of 1749. The contrast is the mechanism of the whole article in miniature. The side that offered freedom recruited from the majority population, and the side that offered sale into bondage had to import and bury its own men.

Bell marks 21 January 1793, the day Louis XVI was guillotined in France, as a hinge for Saint Domingue. The insurgent leaders had fought under royalist colours and had justified their rising as loyalty to a king said to have willed their freedom. With the king dead, that framing collapsed and the surviving mechanism was patronage. Spain, at war with the French Republic and holding the eastern two thirds of the island, could offer commissions, arms and legitimacy to black commanders who would not serve regicides. Bell follows Toussaint into Spanish service and shows him accumulating territory and troops along the mountain corridor from Gonaives toward the Central Plateau, which is the position from which he issued the Camp Turel proclamation that summer once the Republic changed its own terms.

Yellow fever killed three thousand five hundred or more people in Philadelphia in 1797. Most physicians who could leave the city did leave. One who stayed was Felix Pascalis, who had arrived in the United States in 1793 as a refugee from the Caribbean and had treated fever patients at Benjamin Rush's house on Walnut Street during the epidemic of that year. His book on the 1797 outbreak argued against the common opinion that the disease had been carried in on human bodies aboard ships from Saint-Domingue. He allowed that ships brought it, and held that it moved through wood and air rather than from person to person, rising as putrid exhalations from the timber wharves along the city's two rivers as they dried out. His recommendation was to replace the wharves with stone and coat the stone with tar once a year. The theory was wrong. The habit of plotting cases against places became part of epidemiology.