Louverture left Santo Domingo’s slavery intact and favored gradual emancipation.

Evidence

“We have often talked,” he told Agé, “about the bad way in which general liberty was applied to the French portion of the colony, and how important it is to rule wisely in order to make sure it reigns there without causing problems. … The universal liberty that had been granted to the slaves in the French colony, then, could not be applied: “we must change nothing in the system that currently exists.” Like many critics of the 1794 decree in Paris, Louverture seems to have envisioned a process of gradual emancipation as the ideal. And for the relatively small percentage of the population still enslaved in Santo Domingo, his occupation in 1801 seems not to have brought immediate liberty. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 839

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did Louverture reconcile championing French emancipation with leaving Santo Domingo’s enslaved population in bondage?
• DEFINE: Clarifies that the 1794 emancipation decree he enforced was only ever meant as a particular colonial policy, not a universal principle he endorsed.