Louverture promises not to touch Jamaica and gets Britain out

Brigadier General Thomas Maitland, sent from London to wind up a failed five year invasion, chose to negotiate the British withdrawal with Louverture rather than with Hedouville, the ranking French civilian in the colony. Girard explains the choice as a deliberate wedge, meant to raise up a man more useful to British interests, and it worked because Louverture had just manoeuvred his two civilian superiors into leaving for France. The agreement signed at Mole Saint-Nicolas committed Louverture to leave Jamaica alone and to pardon colonists who had sided with the British. Maitland turned away Hedouville's envoy and treated Louverture as an honoured guest, which Girard says mattered to a man who wanted white officials to deal with him as an equal. Louverture kept much of the text secret and refused Maitland's private offer of independence under British protection. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard treats the terms as treasonous by French standards and shows Louverture concealing them, against readings that present the evacuation deal as a straightforward military victory.

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.