A French general reports nine in ten of his soldiers are gone

Writing to the naval minister on 25 March 1795, the French representative Etienne Laveaux gave figures that explain why emancipation was not optional. Of 10,288 soldiers sent to Saint-Domingue only 990 remained, and of 952 officers only 262. Yellow fever and malaria, not battle, did most of this. Girard notes a French officer's earlier estimate that four white men had to be sent for one to be alive four years later. Former slaves, numbering more than half a million in Saint-Domingue at the start of the revolution and far more resistant to tropical fevers, became the replacement. Regulations required black civilians to keep working on estates even after abolition, so joining the army was a way out of field labour, and the constitution of 1795 reserved the vote to soldiers and the wealthy. By 1796 a third of the officers and seven eighths of the soldiers in Guadeloupe were black.

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.

The 1795 constitution replaced the 1794 decree with a clause saying a person may hire out time and services but cannot sell himself or be sold, and that his person is not alienable property. Slavery is not mentioned. The article shows why this mattered by noting that the meaning of the clause came up in debate and needed clarification from the floor. Recast as a restriction on freedom of contract rather than a protection of individual liberty, the ban borrows the vocabulary of natural law arguments that had historically been used to defend slavery, since those arguments assumed a right to sell oneself. The effect was to sever the ban from the insurgency in Saint-Domingue that had forced it, and to reopen the question of how competing universal rights, especially property against liberty, should be balanced.

Thomas Jefferson twice paid for the services of an enslaved healer known as Perkins's Sam, in November 1798 and August 1799, to attend George and George Junior at Monticello during illnesses nobody could explain. Those were the only two occasions on which he paid an enslaved practitioner at all, though he regularly bought medicine from white ones. Four unusual deaths occurred in that household in these years, and Sam was very likely the practitioner in each. In January and April 1800 letters within the family discuss the same negro doctor who attended the Georges, this time in connection with an attempt to prosecute a conjuror for poisoning other enslaved people. The accused ran away before he could be arrested. A second attempt on Jefferson's properties in 1819 ended in acquittal for want of evidence. Wealthy Virginians called such practitioners in for afflictions they could not name and prosecuted them for the same power.