Enslaved women proved more radical rebels than men in the revolt.

Evidence

Even Jean-François—who may have been a slave, and a maroon, before the Revolution—presented himself to Gros as a kind of hostage to the mass of the insurgents. He told Gros that he had been made “general of the negroes” by the masses of the insurgents, but that unlike them he was not fighting for “general liberty,” which he believed was an impossible goal and would have been dangerous for the “uncivilized hordes” that surrounded him. He had lesser ambitions: he railed against plantation managers and wanted them banned from Saint- Domingue. Most of the insurgents, however, were committed to the “complete destruction of the whites.” Among them, Gros wrote, the women were much “more insolent, harsher,” and less disposed to return to their plantations than the men. The insurgent leader Georges Biassou concurred, singling out the “negresses of the plantations” as a particularly rebellious and recalcitrant group. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 420

Categorization

• XREF: Builds the picture of the revolution’s internal divisions (leaders vs. masses, men vs. women) that carries into later chapters of this book.