News stops travelling at the speed of the person carrying it

Until the 1790s information moved at exactly the pace of the human being carrying it. Fernand Braudel put the best sixteenth century transport at about a hundred kilometres in a day, with letters taking weeks or months. Word of the rising in Saint-Domingue reached Europe by way of Jamaica five weeks after it happened. News of the French Revolution moved no faster inside France. The fall of the Bastille was known in Madrid within thirteen days and had still not arrived at Peronne, 133 kilometres from Paris, until the twenty eighth. In 1793 the Chappe brothers linked Lille and Paris by optic telegraph, the first arrangement that separated the speed of a message from the speed of a traveller. The effect stayed small for sixty years. It became general in 1857, when the first underwater cable across the Atlantic joined Ireland to Newfoundland. Every decision taken in Paris or London about the colony during the revolution rested on information at least five weeks old.

Colonial law in Saint Domingue said very little about the religious practices of the enslaved. Through the eighteenth century it forbade dances and night gatherings over and over, leaving the name of the religion out of the text. That changed in 1797, when the French civil commissioner Leger Felicite Sonthonax prohibited vaudou meetings by name. Sonthonax was the official who had proclaimed general emancipation in the North four years earlier. In 1800 Toussaint Louverture repeated the prohibition and widened it to cover all night gatherings, and the reason recorded at the time was that such meetings were carrying talk of massacring the anciens libres, the people of colour who had been free before the revolution. By 1803 a colonist was describing vaudou as an obscene dance used to encourage murder. Leaders who had come out of the plantations themselves were now policing the ceremonies their own soldiers attended.

On 1 August 1838 the abolition of slavery took full effect on the British island of Dominica and roughly fourteen thousand people stopped being property. An interim period of apprenticeship had run from 1834 and was supposed to ease owners and slaves into the new arrangement. It settled nothing. Dominica registered one of the lowest ratios of enslaved people to land anywhere in the British Caribbean, and for ecological and historical reasons the plantation had never dominated the island the way it dominated the older sugar colonies. Planters and officials could see what abundant land would mean, and from 1834 they had already brought in severe measures to keep apprentices on the estates. Once apprenticeship ended they used every method available to stop cultivators establishing holdings of their own. Most of the freed people could not read, and they spoke a French based creole rather than English, a survival from the period before Britain took the island in 1763. The fight over land and labour ran on for a century.

On 17 May 1809, with rumours running that as many as 6,000 white refugees were about to land, mayor James Mather asked the municipal council of New Orleans for emergency measures. He proposed moving the fish market to a vacant lot so that its five storerooms could house refugee families, collecting blankets for the destitute, and appointing a welfare committee to raise money and find work. The council agreed on 24 May. By August the committee had gathered and given out 5,000 dollars and was asking for a second subscription because people were still arriving. In the financial year that began on 1 May 1809 the residents of the city paid 7,650 dollars in taxes on real estate and enslaved people, at a rate of one dollar for every thousand dollars of property. The two French language papers, the Moniteur and the Courrier, ran letters presenting the newcomers as unfortunate planters and victims of war.