Hostile witnesses wrote most surviving accounts of the revolution’s leaders

Evidence

Many of the central protagonists of the Haitian Revolution, unlike those of the other Atlantic revolutions of the period, left behind few written traces of their political thought. (The major exception is Toussaint Louverture.) Most of what we know about their actions and ideals comes from the writings of (often quite hostile) witnesses, whose views about slavery and slaves profoundly influenced what they wrote. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 33

Categorization

• QUESTION: How do historians bridge the absence of first-person records for figures other than Louverture?