Congress shuts American trade with France and every French dependency

Responding to French privateering against American merchant shipping in the Caribbean, Congress and President Adams enacted a law creating an embargo on all commerce with France and its dependencies and barring French ships from American ports. Saint-Domingue was legally a French dependency, so the statute cut off a trade both sides depended on at the moment when Toussaint Louverture most needed it. Johnson makes this law the hinge of the whole episode. Everything that follows, the emissary sent to Philadelphia, the private dinner, the congressional manoeuvring over which committee would handle the revision, was an effort to carve Saint-Domingue out of a statute written against France. The wider context was the collapse of the Franco-American alliance after the Jay Treaty, the public revelation of the XYZ affair in the spring, and the drift toward undeclared war. Corroborated by 2 works in the library.

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.

Manigat explains the pedagogy behind the kingdom's schools. Joseph Lancaster, a British educator who lived from 1778 to 1838, introduced in England in 1798 a system of popular education promoted by a foundation first called the Royal Lancasterian Institution and later the British and Foreign School Society, whose aim was to make education universal and by which a single master could comfortably run a school of a thousand pupils through eight graded classes. Lancaster published his views in 1803 in a widely noticed book, and a manual followed. Two principles gave the method its originality: all classes ran simultaneously in one large hall, with the first learning letters at the master's desk, classes two to seven working on slates and class eight allowed pen and ink; and the ablest pupils were trained as monitors to teach rows of their fellows, multiplying instructors from within.