In this bicentennial year of Haitian independence, it's a bitter irony that celebrations should be eclipsed by political crisis. French troops, whose evacuation two centuries ago led to the 1804 Proclamation of Independence, are back again patrolling the streets of Port-au-Prince. Once more, Haiti is haunted by instability, foreign intervention, and crushing poverty. In this exhaustively researched and valuable account, Laurent Dubois, a history professor at Michigan State, looks back to the founding of Haiti. The Revolution, Dubois says, left "enduring scars" that included militarism, a tradition of dictatorship, and widespread economic hardship. In those brutal years between 1791 and 1804, more than 100,000 Haitians were killed. The Haitian economy, once the producer of half the sugar and coffee in the entire world, was ravaged. In the period described by Dubois, Haiti fought and defeated three great European powers: France, Britain, and Spain. Moreover, the revolution liberated 90 percent of the population, which had been living under a brutal system of slavery. Haiti's was the first, and the only, successful slave revolt in the history of the world. Moreover, the Haitian Revolution would lead to the doubling of the size of the United States. It was Napoleon's loss of Haiti that convinced the overextended dictator to sell the Louisiana territory to the fledgling US. Dubois opens the book with an impressively detailed description of Haiti's pre- Revolutionary history. Spain and France competed for the island, called Hispaniola, until the 1697 Treaty of Rhyswick granted the western part to France. The French called their colony St. Domingue and created a plantation economy based on sugar and coffee. Slaves were imported from French colonies in Africa, and an oligarchy of plantation owners ruled the land. As Dubois tells it, the local planters resented political and economic interference from France. When decrees were sent from Paris about how slaves should be treated, the planters ignored them and treated their "property" as inhumanely as they wished. Yet there were changes in France that would have a huge impact on Haiti. In the late 18th century, French intellectuals were popularizing the case against slavery. Enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet argued that slavery violated the laws of nature. Organizations such as the Société des Amis des Noirs demanded abolition. The French Revolution changed everything by promoting universal ideals of liberty and equality. Plantation owners in Haiti tried to block the "dangerous" ideas coming from Paris, but the ideas spread among the slaves through smuggled pamphlets and by word of mouth. The Haitian Revolution began in August 1791 when slaves in the northern plains rebelled. Dubois describes how bands of slaves roamed the land, killing plantation owners, burning fields, and destroying equipment. The slave insurgency escalated into a brutal civil war filled with atrocities on both sides. In early 1793, Britain and Spain declared war on Revolutionary France and so Haiti was embroiled in a larger conflict. The French Republic sent commissioners to Haiti who, hoping to attract ex-slaves to fight against Britain and Spain, decided to abolish slavery. Haitian history changed forever in 1794 when Toussaint Louverture, an ex-slave, decided to fight for the French Republic. Within a few years, General Louverture would become the de facto military dictator of Haiti. He drove out the British and the Spanish, eliminated his rivals, and asserted control over the island nation. Dubois adroitly describes Louverture's economic policies: The general chose to maintain the old plantation economy. Ex-slaves were given salaries, but they were forced to remain on the land. Louverture's failure to break up the plantation system was a crucial lost opportunity. The prerevolutionary economic inequalities, as well as a planter oligarchy, would continue to bedevil Haiti. Napoleon Bonaparte resented Louverture's independence, and he coveted Haiti's wealth. In early 1802, Bonaparte sent his brother-in-law, General Leclerc, with a large army to reassert French dominance. Louverture and the Haitian people came to believe, quite rightly in the author's estimation, that Napoleon intended to reintroduce slavery. Dubois shows how Leclerc's men, some 80,000 in all, were caught in a military quagmire. After a year and a half of savage guerrilla warfare and an epidemic of yellow fever, 50,000 French soldiers were dead (Leclerc among them). Lourverture ended up dying in a French prison. In late 1803, a defeated French Army boarded ships and left. On Jan. 1, 1804, Haiti proclaimed its independence in a moment of supreme hope. However, the centuries-old legacies of slavery and colonialism would not be so easily dismissed. Dubois, writing in an accessible style and with a wide-ranging focus, has done an impressive job depicting the tumultuous founding of Haiti. Readers wanting to place the Caribbean nation's current struggles in a larger historical context will find Dubois an eminently worthwhile resource. • Chuck Leddy is a freelance writer in Quincy, Mass.
 The Haitian Revolution was one of the great episodes of human history. Although perpetually overshadowed by the American and French Revolutions, which preceded and to a degree caused it, it forever changed the history of the world. It witness the first successful slave uprising, introduced the first African-led nation in the new world, and profoundly affected France, the United States, and the neighboring nations and colonies of the hemisphere. From mythic origins at a slave ceremony in 1791, to successive interventions by French, Spanish and English, to the ultimate achievement of independence in 1804, the Haitian Revolution can be difficult to follow and assess. Indeed, many statesmen of the nineteenth century simply refused to admit that it had taken place. Fortunately, a wide number of contemporary texts assure us that it did, and offer compelling lessons about the adversity the Haitian founders faced at the outset of nationhood.
The Haitian Revolution was the only successful revolt by enslaved Black people in history, and it led to the creation of the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States. Inspired in large part by the French Revolution, diverse groups in the colony of Saint-Domingue began fighting against French colonial power in 1791. Independence was not fully achieved until 1804, at which point a complete social revolution had taken place where formerly enslaved people had become leaders of a nation.
The French Revolution of 1789 was a significant event for the imminent rebellion in Haiti. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was adopted in 1791, declaring "liberty, equality, and fraternity." Historian Franklin Knight calls the Haitian Revolution the "inadvertent stepchild of the French Revolution." In 1789, the French colony of Saint-Domingue was the most successful plantation colony in the Americas: it supplied France with 66% of its tropical produce and accounted for 33% of French foreign trade. It had a population of 500,000, 80% of whom were enslaved people. Between 1680 and 1776, roughly 800,000 Africans were imported to the island, one-third of whom died within the first few years. In contrast, the colony was home to only around 30,000 White people, and a roughly similar number of affranchis, a group of free individuals composed mainly of mixed-race people. Society in Saint Domingue was divided along both class and color lines, with affranchis and White people often at odds in terms of how to interpret the egalitarian language of the French Revolution. White elites sought greater economic autonomy from the metropolis (France). Working-class/poor White people argued for the equality of all White people, not just for landed White people. Affranchis aspired to the power of White people and begun to amass wealth as landowners (often being enslavers themselves). Beginning in the 1860s, White colonists began to restrict the rights of affranchis. Also inspired by the French Revolution, enslaved Black people increasingly engaged in maroonage, running away from plantations to the mountainous interior. France granted almost complete autonomy to Saint-Domingue in 1790. However, it left open the issue of rights for affranchis, and White planters refused to recognize them as equals, creating a more volatile situation. In October 1790, affranchis led their first armed revolt against White colonial authorities. In April 1791, revolts by enslaved Black people begin to break out. In the meantime, France extended some rights to affranchis, which angered White colonists. By 1791, enslaved people and mulattoes were fighting separately for their own agendas, and White colonists were too preoccupied with maintaining their hegemony to notice the growing unrest. Throughout 1791, such revolts grew in numbers and frequency, with enslaved people torching the most prosperous plantations and killing fellow enslaved people who refused to join their revolt. The Haitian Revolution is considered to have begun officially on Aug. 14, 1791, with the Bois Caïman ceremony, a Vodou ritual presided over by Boukman, a maroon leader and Vodou priest from Jamaica. This meeting was the result of months of strategizing and planning by enslaved people in the northern area of the colony who were recognized as leaders of their respective plantations. Ambushing troops in a forest, Haitian revolution, illustration.Due to the fighting, the French National Assembly revoked the decree granting limited rights to affranchis in September 1791, which only spurred on their rebellion. That same month, enslaved people burned one of the colony's most important cities, Le Cap, to the ground. The following month, Port-au-Prince was burned to the ground in fighting between White people and affranchis. The Haitian Revolution was chaotic. At one time there were seven different parties warring simultaneously: enslaved people, affranchis, working-class White people, elite White people, invading Spanish, English troops battling for control of the colony, and the French military. Alliances were struck and quickly dissolved. For example, in 1792 Black people and affranchis became allies with the British fighting against the French, and in 1793 they allied with the Spanish. Furthermore, the French often tried to get enslaved people to join their forces by offering them freedom to help put down the rebellion. In September 1793, a number of reforms took place in France, including the abolition of colonial enslavement. While colonists began negotiating with enslaved people for increased rights, the rebels, led by Touissant Louverture, understood that without land ownership, they could not stop fighting. Portrait of Haitian Patriot Toussaint Louverture.Photo Josse / Leemage / Getty Images Throughout 1794, the three European forces took control of different parts of the island. Louverture aligned with different colonial powers at different moments. In 1795, Britain and Spain signed a peace treaty and ceded Saint-Domingue to the French. By 1796, Louverture had established dominance in the colony, though his hold on power was tenuous. In 1799, a civil war broke out between Louverture and the affranchis. In 1800, Louverture invaded Santo Domingo (the eastern half of the island, modern-day Dominican Republic) to bring it under his control. Between 1800 and 1802, Louverture tried to rebuild the destroyed economy of Saint-Domingue. He reopened commercial relations with the U.S. and Britain, restored destroyed sugar and coffee estates to operating condition, and halted the wide-scale killing of White people. He even discussed importing new Africans to jump-start the plantation economy. In addition, he outlawed the very popular Vodou religion and established Catholicism as the colony's main religion, which angered many enslaved people. He established a constitution in 1801 that asserted the colony's autonomy with respect to France and became a de facto dictator, naming himself governor-general for life. Napoleon Bonaparte, who had assumed power in France in 1799, had dreams of restoring the system of enslavement in Saint-Domingue, and he saw Louverture (and Africans in general) as uncivilized. He sent his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc to invade the colony in 1801. Many White planters supported Bonaparte's invasion. Furthermore, Louverture faced opposition from enslaved Black people, who felt he was continuing to exploit them and who was not instituting land reform. In early 1802 many of his top generals had defected to the French side and Louverture was eventually forced to sign an armistice in May 1802. However, Leclerc betrayed the terms of the treaty and tricked Louverture into getting arrested. He was exiled to France, where he died in prison in 1803. Believing that France's intention was to restore the system of enslavement in the colony, Black people and affranchis, led by two of Louverture's former generals, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe, reignited the rebellion against the French in late 1802. Many French soldiers died from yellow fever, contributing to the victories by Dessalines and Christophe. Dessalines created the Haitian flag in 1803, whose colors represent the alliance of Black and mixed-race people against White people. The French began to withdraw troops in August 1803. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines published the Declaration of Independence and abolished the colony of Saint-Domingue. The original indigenous Taino name of the island, Hayti, was restored. The outcome of the Haitian Revolution loomed large across societies that allowed enslavement in the Americas. The success of the revolt inspired similar uprisings in Jamaica, Grenada, Colombia, and Venezuela. Plantation owners lived in fear that their societies would become "another Haiti." In Cuba, for example, during the Wars of Independence, the Spanish were able to use the specter of the Haitian Revolution as a threat to White enslavers: if landowners supported Cuban independence fighters, their enslaved people would rise up and kill their White enslavers and Cuba would become a Black republic like Haiti. There was also a mass exodus from Haiti during and after the revolution, with many planters fleeing with their enslaved people to Cuba, Jamaica, or Louisiana. It's possible that up to 60% of the population that lived in Saint-Domingue in 1789 died between 1790 and 1796. The newly independent Haiti was isolated by all the western powers. France would not recognize Haiti's independence until 1825, and the U.S. did not establish diplomatic relations with the island until 1862. What had been the wealthiest colony in the Americas became one of the poorest and least developed. The sugar economy was transferred to colonies where enslavement was still legal, like Cuba, which quickly replaced Saint-Domingue as the world's leading sugar producer in the early 19th century. According to historian Franklin Knight, "The Haitians were forced to destroy the entire colonial socioeconomic structure that was the raison d'etre for their imperial importance; and in destroying the institution of slavery, they unwittingly agreed to terminate their connection to the entire international superstructure that perpetuated the practice and the plantation economy. That was an incalculable price for freedom and independence." Knight continues, "The Haitian case represented the first complete social revolution in modern history...no greater change could be manifest than the slaves becoming masters of their destinies within a free state." In contrast, the revolutions in the U.S., France, and (a few decades later) Latin America were largely "reshufflings of the political elites—the ruling classes before remained essentially the ruling classes afterward."
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Was the Haitian Revolution successful
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