White planters abandoned ruined plantations whose slaves had joined the insurgency.

Evidence

Some whites sold their belongings and left the colony, harboring little hope for the return of peace and prosperity. A newspaper advertisement offered a coffee plantation several miles from Le Cap for sale, seeking to make the best of a relatively unattractive proposition: all the buildings had been destroyed, although a few walls were still standing; of the forty-eight “heads of negroes” that were to be included in the sale, thirty were off fighting the insurgents; the remaining slaves, including seven that were “lost with the brigands,” would be included on the off chance they ever returned. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 518

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the plantation economy in collapse, grounding the wider picture of the Haitian Revolution’s economic unraveling.