Sailors and revolution: naval mutineers in Saint-Domingue, 1790-93

From 1790 to 1793, unruly sailors from French naval vessels sent to Saint-Domingue were in an almost constant state of mutiny. They also intervened regularly in the colony's violent political quarrels. Rather than siding with the oppressed black slaves and free men of color in their struggles for equality, as some historians have supposed, the sailors regularly supported white colonists' defiance of France's revolutionary government. It was an attack by sailors on the republican civil commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel that drove the two men to make the first offer of liberty to the slaves, and set in motion the chain of events that led the National Convention to abolish slavery in 1794.