2.12 Legacies of the Haitian Revolution

Saint-Domingue, the French colony on the western part of the island of Hispaniola, was the richest colony in the Caribbean, built on sugar and coffee grown by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans. In 1791 they rose up. Over thirteen years of war, under leaders such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, they defeated French, Spanish and British forces.

In 1804 Haiti declared independence. It was the second independent nation in the Americas, after the United States, and the first free of slavery. No other revolt by enslaved people ever overturned a colonial, slaveholding government.

Maroons, people who escaped slavery and formed free communities, played a key part. They carried information between scattered groups and organized attacks. Many of the freedom fighters had been soldiers in Africa, captured during civil wars in the Kingdom of Kongo and sold to Saint-Domingue. A spiritual ceremony at Bois Caïman in August 1791 helped launch the uprising (1.7).

• France lost its most profitable colony and abolished slavery across its empire from 1794 to 1802, before Napoleon brought it back.
• The cost of fighting in Haiti pushed Napoleon to sell the Louisiana Territory to the US in 1803. The sale nearly doubled the country's size, and the federal government opened much of the land to slavery.
• With Haiti's plantations destroyed, sugar production grew in the US, Cuba and Brazil.
• White planters and enslaved Black refugees fled to US cities like Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia. Fear of spreading revolts contributed to the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798).
• France demanded payments in return for recognizing Haiti's independence. Haiti paid for about 122 years, which badly held back its development.

Haiti's 1805 constitution declared that all Haitian citizens would be known as Black. In a world where 'Black' usually marked someone as an outsider or noncitizen, Haiti made it a name for citizenship and belonging.

For many African Americans, Haiti showed what the American Revolution had promised but not delivered. It inspired revolts across the diaspora, including the 1811 German Coast Uprising in Louisiana (2.13) and the 1835 Malê Uprising of enslaved Muslims in Brazil (2.16). In 1893 Frederick Douglass, a former US minister to Haiti, praised the revolution in a lecture at the Chicago World's Fair. In the 1980s and 1990s the artist Jacob Lawrence made a series of prints on Toussaint Louverture's life, which shows how the revolution kept inspiring Black artists.