Planters feared the very word liberty would ignite colonial revolution

Evidence

“People here are drunk with liberty,” wrote the Saint-Domingue deputies in Paris to their constituents in August 1789. “The peril is great; it is near.” … If they even said the word “slavery,” they complained, the abolitionists might seize the opportunity to demand emancipation. The population in the colony must be extremely vigilant, seizing “writings in which the word ‘Liberty’ appears,” increasing their guard in plantations and towns, and watching for free-coloreds arriving “from Europe.” Julien Raimond intercepted this letter and gave it to Mirabeau, whose used it to expose the planters as enemies of the Revolution, men afraid of the word “liberty” itself. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 267

Categorization

• XREF: The fear that universal-rights language would spread echoes the earlier readings on how small rhetorical acts carry revolutionary charge; also prefigures the slave revolt this book centers.
• SEED: An essay angle: how metropolitan universalism collided with colonial particularism in the early Revolution, and why the planters’ own word-wariness was self-incriminating.