Planters blamed abolitionist propaganda and white agitators for the revolt.

Evidence

The planter Madame de Rouvray wrote that the insurrection was the direct result of the actions taken in metropolitan France by abolitionists. “The scelerats [villains] swore they would have us slaughtered by our slaves!” she exclaimed, perhaps thinking of the famous passage prophesying insurrection in the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique. Madame de Rouvray found further proof of her assertion in reports claiming that there were whites leading the slave insurgents in battle. Along with the 150 slave insurgents her husband had killed just the day before, she wrote in September, was one white man who was carbonisé—covered in carbon as a kind of blackface. Another account claimed, similarly, that there were whites leading the insurgents “with blackened faces,” and who “were discovered by their hair.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 352