A distinct ethical code shaped Black rebels’ selective restraint toward white civilians.

Evidence

Why did Nat Turner, admittedly a violent man, spare poor whites? Why did Toussaint escort his absent “master’s” family to safety before joining the slave revolution? Why was “no white person killed in a slave rebellion in colonial Virginia”? Why would Edmund Morgan or Gerald Mullin argue that slave brutality was directly related to acculturation, “that the more slaves came to resemble the indigent freemen whom they displaced, the more dangerous they became”? Every century it was the same. The people with Chilembwe in 1915 force-marched European women and children to the safety of colonist settlement. And in that tradition, in the 1930s, James ambivalently found Dessalines wanting for his transgressions of the tradition. Dessalines was a military genius, yes. He was shrewd, cunning, but he was also a man whose hatred had to be kept “in check.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 831