Enslaved Africans interpreted revolutionary liberty as a license to flee and govern themselves.

Evidence

As Jefferson sat forward on his Windsor chair and penned this thrilling call for revolutionary action, thousands of Africans were taking matters into their own hands, too, running away from their plantations, setting up their own governments on the frontier, or fighting with the British—all to “effect their safety & happiness.” … Of course, racist planters could not admit that Black runaways were self-reliant enough to effect their own safety and happiness—to be free. South Carolina planters blamed British soldiers for “stealing” Blacks or persuading them to “desert” their masters. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 274

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s goal of testing the causal inversion: here the planters’ racist ‘runaway/deserter’ framing is an idea produced to justify policy (recapturing self-emancipating Africans) — a clean instance of Kendi’s scheme. — connects to: Wealth accumulation enabled a freed slave to seed a self-governing maroon nation — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1375