Toussaint rescues Laveaux and is made lieutenant-governor

General Jean-Louis Villatte, the ambitious free coloured commandant of Cap Français, launched a coup against governor Étienne Laveaux. Louverture and fellow black officers rescued him and crushed the rebellion, and and in a theatrical stroke Laveaux named Toussaint his lieutenant-governor. Paris raised him to division general over the summer, and Sonthonax gave him command of the whole colonial army in May 1797. Geggus stresses what the episode did to the balance of forces: Villatte's defeat left anciens libres resentful throughout the north, and Sonthonax's attempt to bring André Rigaud in the south to heel opened a public breach between the regions. Around the same time plantation workers rebelled repeatedly, sometimes against military service and sometimes fearing the restoration of slavery, as Toussaint pressed the revival of plantation agriculture that financed his army. Corroborated by 3 works in the library.

Starvation ended the Second Carib War. The British had worked out that destroying the hidden provision grounds would do what pursuit could not, and the survivors who came down from the mountains were described by the botanist Alexander Anderson as a spectacle of misery. Britain then decided to remove them from St Vincent altogether. They were shipped first to Balliceaux, a small island nearby, where roughly half of them died under British military supervision, probably of continued famine together with yellow fever or some similar epidemic. Nancie Gonzalez counts 4,338 deported to Balliceaux and 2,248 alive to make the onward voyage to Roatan, an island off the coast of Honduras. Years later a Guatemalan envoy, Jose Rossi y Rubi, came to Roatan to negotiate resettlement on the Central American mainland and asked one of their leaders where his loyalties lay. The man answered that he commanded in nobody's name and was a Carib subordinate to no one.

Pennsylvania freed any enslaved person whose owner brought them into the state and settled there for six months. Colonists arriving from Saint Domingue met the deadline and then signed the newly freed person to an indenture, until the age of twenty eight for a child, or seven years for anyone over twenty one. Most of the black refugees were teenagers, so the term ran for most of their working youth. Between 1791 and 1795 some 284 slaveholding colonists released 442 people, and nearly all went straight into indentures which the former owners then sold for cash to farmers who wanted labour cheaper than white wages. Of 659 people released from bondage in the city between 1789 and 1810, forty five walked away outright. One colonist tried to beat the clock by moving her slaves across the river to Burlington after five months and three weeks; the abolition society argued six lunar months of twenty eight days and won.

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.