A merchant tells Pickering that black Saint-Domingue wants trade

Pickering asked the wealthy New York merchant Richard Yates about opinion in the southern and western parts of the island. Yates had come back from Saint-Domingue days before and gave an answer directly opposed to an anonymous manifesto then circulating in the department, which urged the European powers and the United States to invade jointly and return the former slaves to their old masters. The black population that held most of the colony, Yates reported, had no wish to fight the United States and felt the loss of a trade that had benefited both. He told Pickering he had no doubt of their readiness to declare the colony independent, and predicted that a Franco-American war and the end of supply from France would produce exactly that. Officials across the cabinet came to share his reading.

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.

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.

Hedouville installed himself at Cap Francais on 20 April 1798, having landed a month earlier on the Spanish side of the island where Toussaint's power did not yet reach. Toussaint was not there to greet him and excused himself in a run of letters citing his campaigns on the west coast and the difficulty of the terrain. Bell finds the excuse unconvincing given how fast Toussaint habitually moved, and identifies the real business: he was running his own talks about a British evacuation with General Thomas Maitland, newly in charge of British operations three weeks before Hedouville landed. The mechanism was leverage. The British expedition had earned something over five hundred thousand pounds in exports while costing more than seven million and about twenty thousand casualties, and Maitland had 2,500 European troops against a reported twenty thousand.