The Convention makes Toussaint a brigadier general the day after Basel

On 23 July 1795 the French National Convention raised Toussaint Louverture from colonel to brigadier general in recognition of his services. Bell notes the promotion arriving one day after the Treaty of Basel, so that the Republic simultaneously acquired a paper title to the whole island and formalised the rank of the officer who would end up holding it. The mechanism of Toussaint's rise inside the French command was usefulness combined with correspondence. His long reports to Governor Laveaux show him settling local quarrels, disciplining subordinates and explaining his methods, and Bell reads the letters as an apprenticeship in colonial administration conducted in public. By early 1796 he was writing to Laveaux as a friend and invoking the Republic's decrees of liberty as the reason the black population owed France its loyalty.

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.

Opening a chapter written for a volume on Curacao, Geggus argues that violent slave rebellion peaked between the 1770s and the 1840s, that the 1790s were the most intense decade within that span, and that the single year 1795 may be unique for the number of distinct incidents occurring in different slave societies at once. The rising in western Curacao that summer therefore sits inside a hemispheric wave rather than standing alone. The mechanism he offers is not a single cause but a convergence. The enslaved population of the Americas stood near three million and was still growing, plantation sizes in the Caribbean were large enough to make mobilisation easy, and the political order of the slaveholding powers was coming apart. He counts about 180 incidents in his appendix and warns that this is a minimum, undercounting Brazil and Cuba, and that revolts outnumber conspiracies in the record partly because of how news was gathered.

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.