Ex-slave elites and officers resisted returning plantations to white owners.
Evidence
As planters returned to Saint-Domingue, they often found themselves in competition with new groups of elites, often ex-slaves, who controlled their properties. Given the economic possibilities opening up during this period, these new managers were not sanguine about handing over plantations to their old owners. The many military officers who were renting abandoned plantations could call on their loyal service to the nation— which contrasted sharply with the treasonous actions of the returning white planters—in laying claim to the land. They were also tightly connected with, and indeed often controlled, the local administrations that were given the responsibility of overseeing the transfer of property back to their original owners. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 795
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
Related
- Former slaves refused to surrender land to returning planters. (similarity 0.90)
- Emancipated slaves kept control of plantations while former masters petitioned bureaucracies for return (similarity 0.86)
- Ex-slaves physically held plantations while planters waited impotently for restitution (similarity 0.84)
- Former slaves openly defied returning white owners who still viewed them as property (similarity 0.84)
- Revolt empowered individual slaves to seize control of plantations (similarity 0.83)
- Ex-slave landlords replaced whites as the new plantation owners in Saint-Domingue (similarity 0.83)
- Most ex-slaves stayed laborers with no land claims after emancipation (similarity 0.83)
- Former slaves crafted planters’ return narratives to entrap and expel them (similarity 0.82)
- Ex-slaves had to surrender freedom to work as cultivators to defend emancipation. (similarity 0.82)
- Former slaves sought land independence by buying small plots and leaving plantations (similarity 0.81)
- Bonaparte’s planters-turned-advisers misjudged how a decade of revolution transformed the ex-slaves (similarity 0.80)
- Planters believed the Assembly would abolish slavery and sought transnational slaveholder alliance (similarity 0.80)
- Slaves in the western province took over plantations rather than destroying them (similarity 0.79)
- The uprising so depleted plantations that surviving whites had to rent other people’s slaves (similarity 0.79)
- Slaves claimed a right to fair treatment and seized plantations rather than destroying them (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Former slaves refused to surrender land to returning planters.
#corroborates(0.90) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 798 - Former slaves sought land independence by buying small plots and leaving plantations
#expands(0.65) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 847 - Black labourers resisted plantation dependence by pursuing peasant and artisan autonomy
#expands(0.60) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1151 - Ex-slaves resisted masters’ return while tolerating them as mere residents
#corroborates(0.55)