French commissioners initially backed slavery as necessary to colonial survival

Evidence

On their arrival in Saint-Domingue the commissioners did what they could to dispel such fears, announcing clearly that they had come to grant political rights to free-coloreds in order to salvage slavery, not destroy it. Sonthonax declared that the colonial assemblies were the only bodies with “the right to rule on the lot of the slaves” and that slavery was “necessary to the cultivation and prosperity of the colonies.” It was neither his nor the National Assembly’s intention to attack the rights of the planters in this regard. (Several months later, in a private letter to Brissot, Sonthonax noted his opposition to any sudden emancipation, which would “undoubtedly lead to the massacre of all the whites.”) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 494

Categorization

• XREF: Shows emancipation came reluctantly and pragmatically, not ideologically — contrasts with the event’s later framing as an abolitionist triumph.