The Convention celebrated emancipation partly as a military weapon against Britain

Evidence

Belley shouted: “I was a slave during my childhood. Thirty-six years have passed since I became free through my own labor, and purchased myself. Since then, in the course of my life, I have felt worthy of being French.” “It is the tricolor flag that has called us to our liberty,” he continued, and vowed “on behalf of my brothers” that it would fly upon the shores and mountains of Saint-Domingue “as long as there is a drop of blood in our veins.” “This is the death of the English!” the famed revolutionary leader Danton proclaimed. The colony would have a powerful army born out of emancipation and ready to die to defend it. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 586

Categorization

• XREF: Danton reading emancipation as ‘the death of the English’ plugs directly into the wider Atlantic-war frame: freed Black soldiers become a strategic army, echoing the earlier chapters’ framing of colonial troops.