Chatoyer writes to French planters in the language of liberty

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.

The wars that began with the rising of August 1791 broke the plantation economy of Saint-Domingue by destroying the two things it ran on, forced labour and fixed capital. The export figures show the scale. Measured against their levels of 1789, in 1795 sugar exports stood at 1.2 percent, coffee at 2.8 percent, cotton at 0.7 percent and indigo at 0.5 percent. All four except indigo recovered strongly up to 1802, and then the French invasion of that year pushed them down again, leaving 1804 with sugar at 34 percent, coffee at 40, cotton at 43 and indigo at 4 percent of pre revolutionary levels. Reports from 1803 describe burned cities, demolished sugar mills, carbonised beams and plantations reduced to ash, with only the small plots of coffee and food crops showing any life. The population fell from 520,000 in 1790 to 380,000 in 1805.

The French traveller Moreau de Saint-Mery published the first volume of his description of the French part of Hispaniola in 1797. He had presided over the electors of Paris in July 1789. His account of the rites and beliefs of enslaved people is the earliest to come near what was actually happening, and he still condemned what he had watched as a kind of bacchanal that ended in disgusting prostitution. He noted that the participants were Arada people, from the town of Allada in Dahomey, and that they lived by the rules of their religion. Worship centred on dances around a snake kept in a wired box on an altar, from which the faithful were said to gain knowledge of past and future. A goat was killed and its blood poured over those present, who swore to stay faithful. He described the trance that followed without a word for what it was.

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.