With these words the marquis de Gallifet learned of the destruction wrought on his plantations by the August 1791 slave insurrection. The writer of the letter, Millot, owned a neighboring plantation that had suffered a similar fate. Writing from Le Cap, he described an “immeasurable” devastation and lamented that the colony, “once flourishing,” now was nothing more than “ashes and rivers of blood.”

Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ …, loc. 130