It showed something else that was equally frightening. Initially, the Saint Domingue plantation owners thought that the insurgents did not have “combinaison d’idées nécessaire” to sustain a successful revolt.63 The ideas that drove the American and French Revolutions were supposed to be “FOR WHITES ONLY.”64 But the Haitian Revolution’s leaders had welded egalité, liberté, and fraternité into a mighty sword for Black liberation.65 They, in fact, exceeded the parameters of the American Revolution by making the struggle not only about civil liberties but about racial equality.66
