Toussaint changes sides and joins self-liberation to a modern state

Across the spring and summer of 1794 Toussaint Louverture, the third ranking of the black generals in Spanish service, secretly moved his allegiance from a royalist slaveholding monarchy to abolitionist republican France. He then struck in quick succession at the Spanish, the British, and his former comrades Jean-Francois and Biassou. Geggus states the significance in structural terms. For the first time the force of black self liberation was combined with the ideology of French liberty and the resources of a modern state, and the war in the Caribbean turned into a war about the future of slavery and racial equality. He also notes what Louverture was before this. Born enslaved in the colony, he had been free for more than twenty years, had owned or rented land and a small number of slaves, and was an obscure figure through the first two years of the insurrection.

On 12 March 1795 Joseph Chatoyer circulated a proclamation in French among the planters living on St Vincent. It opens with a question. Is there a Frenchman who would hold back at the hour when liberty is being spoken aloud? It asks its readers to gather as citizens and brothers under the colours already flying on the island. The second half sets out what refusal costs. Anyone not assembled with the Caribs by the end of the day would be treated as a traitor to the country, their estates burned and their families killed. The document ends with Chatoyer's own mark in place of a signature, a figure that appears to draw on the rock carvings of St Vincent rather than on any European convention. It survives in the British colonial records. Within days plantations were burning, and the Caribs had allies among French settlers, enslaved people and troops sent from Guadeloupe by Victor Hugues.

On his expedition along the Niger river in 1793 and 1794, Mungo Park reported Mande speakers using amulets made from animal horns filled with saphoes, papers carrying passages from the Koran. In Senegambia, Muslims and others alike had long gone to itinerant scholars for pieces of Arabic writing to put inside protective pouches, and the Portuguese called these bolsas de mandinga. John Matthews, a Royal Navy lieutenant in Sierra Leone in the 1780s, found the same practice further south, powders and scraps of Koranic text in small bags, and recorded that people wore several at once, each against a separate misfortune: one to preserve the wearer from shot, one from poison, one from fire, one from drowning. The bags crossed the Atlantic with the people who wore them. In Bahia the Lisbon Inquisition prosecuted their possession, and men wore them into battle in Jamaica in 1760 and in Bahia in 1835.

In 1794 the people of Philadelphia raised fourteen thousand dollars for refugees from Saint Domingue. Thirteen thousand of it paid to send white refugees back to the island. Another four thousand was collected to buy passages to France, and more went to widows of men who had died in the colony. Black refugees were given no relief by the French authorities, by the government of George Washington or by the private donors. At that moment Absalom Jones and Richard Allen were collecting small sums to build the African Church of Philadelphia, which became the first black church erected in the United States. White philanthropy turned toward the fleeing colonists and the church fund stalled. Its organisers had spent two years gathering three thousand five hundred dollars. Twelve thousand was raised in a few days for slaveholders who had just lost the labour of the people they owned.