Abolition’s architects were recalled to trial while the colony ran untended for two years.

Evidence

The same boat that had carried the official news of the abolition of slavery to Saint-Domingue had also, ironically, brought an order for the commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel to report back to Paris. There they would have to face charges levied by exiled planters who were set on taking revenge against them. For Sonthonax, a “more curious mixture of triumph and humiliation could scarcely be imagined.” His actions in Saint- Domingue had been vindicated by the Convention, but he was being called back to stand trial in front of the “aristocrats of the skin” whose power he and Polverel had destroyed by proclaiming emancipation. The commissioners left the colony in the hands of Etienne Laveaux and of his new converts to the cause of the Republic. For the next two years, in the midst of war, the colony received no assistance from France, and no concrete directives on policy. Left on their own, Laveaux and Louverture pushed back the colony’s attackers and built a new order on the smoking foundations of slavery. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 621

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the wider irony across Atlantic revolutions of leaders vindicated in principle yet punished politically with the same dispatch carrying their triumph.