The word vaudou enters a colonial decree for the first time

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.

News of the French takeover of the Dutch Republic and the creation of the Batavian Republic had already been part of Tula's argument the previous year. In 1796 it worked its way through the colonial administration. The ancien régime governor Johannes de Veer withdrew and was replaced by a politically colourless local bureaucrat, Jan Jacob Beaujon, who was in turn replaced by an apparently more outspoken pro-French Patriot, Johann Rudolf Lauffer, all within the same year. Oostindie stresses that this reshuffle reflected dynamics inside the white elite, between Orangists and Patriots but also within Patriot circles, over questions that came down to trade and economic interest. Sections of the free coloured population had their own stake in the 1796 power games, mainly better representation in local politics, and there is evidence of open and sometimes violent free coloured protest, but no sign of organised cross-colour action aiming at radical change.

Thornton records that in 1796 Macaya and other band commanders proposed a general massacre of whites, and uses the episode to show that a single leader could work with both of the Kongolese royal models he has reconstructed. To his own followers a leader might present himself as the conqueror king who ruled by force and could act with impunity; to those who would lead a united Haiti he might be an advocate of the blacksmith king, the founder who ruled with consent. Thornton reads the atrocity stories that fill the archives with care, allowing that the brutality of the slave regime and the ferocity of its suppression could generate revenge cycles, and that some tales were invented to turn French opinion against the rebels. Still, he notes that early leaders such as Jeannot enforced iron discipline through terror and displayed African religious paraphernalia in camp.

In the middle of June 1798 four vessels from Saint Domingue reached Philadelphia. Governor Thomas Mifflin forbade the landing of any of the black passengers aboard them and asked President John Adams for authority to stop such landings in neighbouring states and to keep their owners out of Pennsylvania altogether. The fear behind the order had been building for years. Enslaved people had set a series of fires in Albany in November 1793, the practice was said to have spread, night patrols in Philadelphia were increased, and a fire broke out in the city on 4 January 1797. White Philadelphians had come to speak of black insurrection as an infection that ships could carry. The standoff ended when letters from the white colonists on board assured the city that only fifty five enslaved people were with them and that none had ever carried arms.