France frees its slaves seventy years before the United States does

When Britain and Spain invaded in 1793, neither with any intention of freeing anyone, France's agent in the colony was Sonthonax, who had published antislavery articles in Paris. Facing pockets of slave resistance, a hostile white population and two of Europe's great powers, he announced immediate emancipation, and in 1794 Paris ratified the decision and extended it to Guadeloupe. Girard sets the dates side by side to make his point about sequence. France was the first major power to free its slaves, Britain followed in 1833, the United States in 1865 and Brazil in 1888. He then records what the decree did not achieve. Many free men of colour, slave owners themselves, joined the British in the ports they held, and prominent black commanders including Biassou, Jean-Francois and Louverture went on fighting for monarchist, slaveholding Spain.

On 10 May 1795 Jose Caridad Gonzalez, an African from the Loango coast, joined Jose Leonardo Chirino in leading a rising of enslaved and free Black people in the Coro district of Venezuela. It was not the first of its kind there. A rebellion around Caracas in 1749 was led by a man remembered as Miguel Loango. Central Africans shipped through Loango made up a large part of the enslaved population of Maracaibo, Caracas, the state of Falcon and the Barlovento district of Miranda. The coastal town of Curiepe, founded in the seventeenth century by two men called Manuel and Antonio Congo, was the first settlement of free Black people in the country. The demands raised in 1795 were taken up two years later by Manuel Gual and Jose Maria Espana, whose conspiracy Venezuela treats as a founding act. The port that filled Saint-Domingue filled Venezuela as well, and risings followed in both places.

Geggus closes his study with an episode from August 1791, about a week before the revolt broke out across the plain. Fire had been started in several cane pieces at Haut-du-Cap, and the slaves rallied round Toussaint and the driver Bruno to put it out. With the manager absent, they then cut and processed the cane on their own initiative before it could spoil. When the general uprising began, the same anonymous source, probably Bayon de Libertat, reports that the Haut-du-Cap workforce did not join in but stayed on the estate, though Geggus adds that they may have had little choice once the place became a military camp. Two years later, after Le Cap burned and slavery was abolished, the same people offered at Toussaint's urging to provide for the ruined attorney's family.

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.