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Hedouville sets up at Le Cap and Toussaint does not come to meet him

20 April 1798 · Haitian

The 1700sThe Great Reclamation1 source
20 April 1798 · Haitian

Hedouville sets up at Le Cap and Toussaint does not come to meet him

The new French agent arrives to find his subordinate negotiating with the British.

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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.

Gabriel HedouvilleThomas MaitlandToussaint Louverture Cap FrancaisSanto Domingo
Where this comes from Bell, M. S. (2007). Toussaint Louverture: A biography. Pantheon Books. p. 156.in the library
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Meanwhile, and next door

1798 to 1800 · Diasporaspan

Jefferson pays an enslaved doctor twice and then hunts a conjuror

Four unexplained deaths at Monticello, one practitioner, and a prosecution that failed.

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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.

Thomas JeffersonPerkins's Sam MonticelloVirginia
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1796 to 1797 · Caribbeanspan

Half the Caribs deported to Balliceaux never left it

Of 4,338 sent to the small island, 2,248 survived to be shipped on to Honduras.

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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.

Alexander AndersonJose Rossi y RubiCaribs of St Vincent St VincentBalliceauxRoatanHonduras
Meanwhile, and next door Read these right here. You keep your place. Peek ›1797Moreau de Saint-Mery describes a ceremony and calls it a bacchanal
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1797 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

Moreau de Saint-Mery describes a ceremony and calls it a bacchanal

The first account of Vodou to come close to the thing itself, written by a man who despised it.

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The French traveller Moreau de Saint-Mery published the first volume of his description of the French part of Hispaniola in 1797. He had presided over the electors of Paris in July 1789. His account of the rites and beliefs of enslaved people is the earliest to come near what was actually happening, and he still condemned what he had watched as a kind of bacchanal that ended in disgusting prostitution. He noted that the participants were Arada people, from the town of Allada in Dahomey, and that they lived by the rules of their religion. Worship centred on dances around a snake kept in a wired box on an altar, from which the faithful were said to gain knowledge of past and future. A goat was killed and its blood poured over those present, who swore to stay faithful. He described the trance that followed without a word for what it was.

Moreau de Saint-Mery Saint-DomingueAllada
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