James ' historical narrative on the events leading up to the Haitian revolution shows that the racist, derogatory portrayal of Haitian slaves by their owners was an attempt to perpetruate the image of their inferiority, which made it easier to justify their enslavement. As illustrated by James in The Black Jacobins, white slave owners not only tortured and degraded their slaves with labor and punishments, but also attempted to suppress any evidence of the slaves ' humanity. One colonist by the name of Hilliard d ' Auberteuil, for instance, wrote of the intelligence and the "precision of ideas and accuracy of judgment" of the black man in his book in 1749, which was subsequently banned. According to James, "It was this intelligence which refused to be crushed, these latent possibilities, that frightened the colonists, as it frightens the whites in Africa today" (James 26). The very fact that the white colonists knew their slaves to be intelligent and were, more importantly, afraid of the slaves for this reason, shows that they did not truly believe the conventional mindset that listed black Haitians as savages. Morever, that any voice that spoke on behalf of the slaves ' humanity was fervently quelled is further proof that whites did not want them to be seen as anything more than property. If the slaves and the rest of society knew of the black man 's intelligence, it would have only been a matter of time until their freedom and human rights was demanded with a
James ' historical narrative on the events leading up to the Haitian revolution shows that the racist, derogatory portrayal of Haitian slaves by their owners was an attempt to perpetruate the image of their inferiority, which made it easier to justify their enslavement. As illustrated by James in The Black Jacobins, white slave owners not only tortured and degraded their slaves with labor and punishments, but also attempted to suppress any evidence of the slaves ' humanity. One colonist by the name of Hilliard d ' Auberteuil, for instance, wrote of the intelligence and the "precision of ideas and accuracy of judgment" of the black man in his book in 1749, which was subsequently banned. According to James, "It was this intelligence which refused to be crushed, these latent possibilities, that frightened the colonists, as it frightens the whites in Africa today" (James 26). The very fact that the white colonists knew their slaves to be intelligent and were, more importantly, afraid of the slaves for this reason, shows that they did not truly believe the conventional mindset that listed black Haitians as savages. Morever, that any voice that spoke on behalf of the slaves ' humanity was fervently quelled is further proof that whites did not want them to be seen as anything more than property. If the slaves and the rest of society knew of the black man 's intelligence, it would have only been a matter of time until their freedom and human rights was demanded with a