In a letter they wrote several months later to Mauger, a group of other slaves from the plantation declared they were repentant about what they had done. “All the subjects in Saint-Domingue have felt the loss of reason,” they noted. But at the same time they justified their behavior, describing how the old manager had “tyrannized” them, and pointing, as Philipeau had years before, to the financial losses she suffered as proof of this. “We are slaves and your subjects, and we give ourselves over to work as we should, but humanity must interest itself in our fate.”

Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ …, loc. 191