Planters used abolitionists’ rhetoric to discredit their free-colored allies as revolt instigators

Evidence

But planters doubted their sincerity. Grégoire gave them reason to be suspicious. He demanded that slave owners look to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and taunted them to “get themselves out of it if they could”; he caused an uproar in the National Assembly when he attacked planters for their cruelty both to freecoloreds and to their slaves; and he regularly invoked the possibility of slave revolt, reminding readers that all people had the right to insurrection against their oppressors. Planters took advantage of such statements—and of fragmentary and exaggerated reports about slave unrest in the colonies, particularly the 1789 revolt in Martinique—to paint Grégoire and his allies as advocates, and even instigators, of slave revolt. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 288

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Shows how a metropole moral argument over rights was spun into colonial fear of insurrection, a pattern echoing rhetorical escalation in the sacrifice article’s treatment of norm conflict.