White colonists preferred colonial autonomy over loyalty to revolutionary France

Evidence

Sonthonax and Polverel might have expected to find a supportive counterweight to the royalists among poorer, pro-Republican whites. Some residents did support their regime: “Things are better now that the commissioners are here,” one would write in mid-1793. But many who were partisans of revolutionary change tended to support autonomy for Saint- Domingue, and were often as hostile to the threat of a “tyrannical” metropolitan authority as planters were. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 497

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the settlers-vs-metropole dynamic that defined other settler colonies in the same era, and to the revolutionary assemblies’ struggle to control their far-flung colonies.