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 Historians have therefore traced the resonance of those ideas through a
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