Saint-Domingue’s white assembly claimed unprecedented autonomy from both France and its own provincial authorities.

Evidence

Across the Atlantic the Saint-Marc assembly had been busily reshaping the colony on its own terms, bypassing the governor’s authority, passing decrees and applying them without consultation. When the Provincial Assembly of the north attacked this disregard for France’s representative in the colony, the Saint-Marc assembly drew up a document called the “Bases constitutionelles”—“Constitutional Principles.” It was a bold charter for political and economic autonomy, granting the assembly sweeping powers to control not only the internal laws of the colony but also the “exi n h e r i ta n c e 85 ternal regime” of commerce. Even Bryan Edwards, a British writer sympathetic to the planters, admitted that “some of the articles are irreconcilable to every just principle of colonial subordination,” and that the provision granting the assembly control of trade policies was “an extravagant assumption of imperial authority, in a subordinate part of the French empire, as I believe is without precedent.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 297

Categorization

• XREF: The Saint-Marc assembly’s sweeping colonial-autonomy charter parallels American colonists’ 1776 assertions; Dubois even quotes a British critic deeming it ‘without precedent.’