Kadish takes up four French women — Germaine de Staël, Olympe de Gouges, Claire de Duras, and Sophie Doin — who wrote between 1790 and 1825 about the uprisings of 1791 in Haiti. Rather than treating rebel violence as inexplicable, each set it against the violence of slavery itself.

The pairing of terror with blackness in the article's title echoes C. L. R. James, whose The Black Jacobins appeared in 1938, and that echo frames how these writers handled their subject.

Reading their responses closely yields three things at once, Kadish argues: a clearer picture of antislavery sentiment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, evidence of women's part in the political and cultural thought of the period, and a link between the abolitionist cause and women's emergence as writers with a voice of their own.