Jefferson pays an enslaved doctor twice and then hunts a conjuror

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.

Between 1799 and 1800 the general Andre Rigaud, backed by the mulatto officers and proprietors of the southern peninsula, fought Toussaint Louverture, who by then governed the rest of the colony in fact. French agents on the ground worked both sides in the interest of the metropolis. The fighting ended with Rigaud in exile in France. The episode became the founding text for a way of reading Haitian politics in which every alliance and every betrayal is explained by the skin of the man who made it. The actual line-ups were untidy. Toussaint suppressed maroon settlement and the radicalism of large sections of the black field population with the help of powerful mulattoes and whites. His administration protected large estates, kept manufacturing on the plantation model and tied cultivators to the land by military coercion. In 1803 Alexandre Petion, who had come back from France in Leclerc's army, worked out the strategy of the independence war with Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

From 1801, under Toussaint Louverture, the tactic of marronnage revived in Saint Domingue. The people who had been enslaved were now legally free and were being held to compulsory labour on the large estates, producing export crops over which they had no control, and they answered as they had answered slavery. They withdrew onto land where they could grow food, and rebuilt the structures of mutual support that two centuries of African practice in the Caribbean had shaped. When the moment allowed, they rose against the state and the large proprietors. Reading Haitian history as a clean break at 1804 hides this, because the political stage changed hands while the labour question stood still. For the former slaves, control over their own economic and social life remained as unsettled after independence as before, and the machinery used to compel their work was inherited rather than dismantled.

On this day the French adjutant general Devaux told the agent Philippe Roume that a young merchant had submitted a proposal for invading Jamaica. Girard calls it the turning point. Earlier schemes had been ministerial daydreams; Sasportas supplied timing, contacts and a method. His innovation was to insist that the expedition should not merely land soldiers from Saint-Domingue but should raise Jamaica's own enslaved population, arguing that the army had to be recruited inside enemy territory. He wrote of a soul roused by liberty and of avenging friends the British had destroyed, and he reached for scriptural vocabulary in doing so. Roume, a white Creole from Grenada who had once defended slavery, recoiled at first from a proposal that risked a bloodbath among white planters, then met Sasportas in person and was won over. By May he was drafting the operation along Sasportas's lines. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus attributes the 1799 Jamaica scheme to French policy and shows Louverture actively sabotaging it, against accounts that treat it as Haitian subversion.