Hedouville makes freedom conditional on a three-year contract

Stein marks a turn from balance to compulsion. With Britain and Spain defeated and the insurgency in decline, Hedouville decided it was time to tighten the screws and issued his order on plantation policing on 24 July 1798, opening with the claim that the moment had come to take every possible measure to make the colony's agriculture flourish. Its thirty-eight articles proved far more rigorous than anything Sonthonax or Polverel had written. Farm workers had to sign contracts of at least three years with their employers under article eleven and give a year's notice to change estates under article fourteen. Anyone without employment counted as a vagabond and faced six months in prison under article twenty. Even those working needed the manager's written permission to attend a weekday market, and local military commanders were made responsible for enforcing discipline.

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.

In 1800 Dessalines was besieging Jacmel and wanted to marry Marie-Claire Heureuse Bonheur of Leogane. She set a condition on her consent. She was to be allowed to relieve the people trapped inside the town, the children, the old and the starving. Inside Jacmel the population was queuing at Petion's headquarters for a piece of cassava and eating roadside grass, dead horses, rats and shoe leather. Dessalines agreed. Two days later a column of women and girls left Leogane with mules loaded with provisions, medicines and dressings, and halted at the barricades of stakes and packed earth. Petion, at that moment Dessalines's bitterest opponent, had been warned and accepted the offer, and the column was let through. Claire Heureuse lit fires under improvised tripods, peeled vegetables, cooked, opened the medicine cases and dressed wounds, in the white dress she wore for the rest of her life.

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.