Louverture reasoned that defending freedom was a universal right colonists would die to uphold

Evidence

Moreover, he warned, any project to reestablish the old order would require a massive army, for the people of Saint-Domingue would have no choice but to “defend the liberty that the constitution guarantees,” even if it meant fighting France itself. Would not the French take up arms if their freedom was threatened? What would the white planter Vaublanc do, Louverture wondered, if he was, “in his turn, reduced to slavery”? “Would he endure without complaint the insults, the miseries, the tortures, the whippings? And if he had the good fortune to recover his liberty, would he listen without shuddering to the howls of those who wished to tear it from him?” Defending freedom, Louverture suggested, was a universal and inalienable right. And those who fought for it in Saint-Domingue would have little choice but to win, or to die trying. Louverture reminded the French government that there were maroons in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica who had forced the English to grant them “natural rights.” He tactfully avoided invoking events that would have been closer to home for French readers, assuming they had not yet forgotten the insurrection of 1791. But he was warning them not to start another war that they would lose. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 732

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the wider argument that the Haitian Revolution deployed universal Enlightenment rights language against France itself — echoes of the reader’s material on slave revolts claiming natural rights.