Planters and merchants formed the Club Massiac to defend colonial slavery

Evidence

Many representatives in the National Assembly were tacitly committed to maintaining slavery, and abolitionist voices were isolated. Representatives from port towns like Nantes and Bordeaux, which profited from the monopoly regulations governing colonial trade, had important differences with planter representatives. But when faced with a common threat, they banded together. The planter-merchant alliance was crafted and maintained by the Club Massiac, which gathered a broad range of plantation owners from Saint-Domingue, some proprietors of coffee and indigo plantations, others wealthy absentee owners of sugar plantations. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 264

Categorization

• XREF: The planter-merchant alliance mirrors the trading-community institutions in earlier readings on how commercial self-interest organizes collective political action.