White planters blamed abolitionists, not slavery, for inciting the revolt.

Evidence

The society’s correspondent in England, Thomas Clarkson, wrote a pamphlet refuting this idea; slave revolts, he noted, had existed in every slave society going back to Greece and Rome, long before there were abolitionists. The “real cause” of the insurrection, he insisted, was the “Slave Trade.” As long as it continued, revolts were inevitable, and far from being a reason to stop abolitionist efforts, they were a reason to “redouble” them. In Paris the revolutionary firebrand Jean-Paul Marat presented a different kind of defense for the revolt. If the white residents of Saint-Domingue had the right to reject “laws emanating from a legislator who was two thousand leagues away” and to proclaim independence, as he believed they did, the other groups in the colony also had, like all human beings, the right to resist oppression. The whites had made themselves “despotic masters of the mulattoes and tyrannical masters of the blacks,” and if the latter wished to “overthrow the cruel and shameful yoke under which they suffer, they are authorized to use any means available,” even “massacring their oppressors to the last.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 440

Categorization

• XREF: The spread of the revolt into European political debate connects to the wider Atlantic revolutionary context chapters are painting.