Insurgent chiefs Biassou and Jean-François sold people as slaves for profit

Evidence

Calling on all the slave insurgents to follow the example of Pierrot and come to the Republican side, the commissioners criticized the “unworthy chiefs” who were still fighting for the Spanish. These leaders, they claimed, were themselves slave traders, capturing children in Saint-Domingue and selling them to the Spanish. (Contemporary reports do indeed suggest that Biassou, as well as Jean-François, sold women, children, and some men described as “troublemakers” as slaves for their own profit.) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 549

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did these rebel leaders reconcile professed loyalty to kings with selling slaves themselves — was it economic gain or royalist ideology masking self-interest?
• XREF: Revolutionary leaders profiting from the very institution they fought parallels corruption themes in Things Fall Apart’s colonial power dynamics.