The Haitian Revolution 1791-1804
Saint-Domingue was a mountainous island and the most important sugar colony for France. What began as a slave rebellion evolved into the world’s only successful slave revolt and the creation of a new nation. The Enlightenment ideas that man could think for himself and govern himself were taken literally by slaves in Saint-Domingue. As France became more engrossed in its own revolution, slaves in Saint-Domingue took advantage of the chaos. But their success came at an extremely high price.
French merchants and plantation owners imported hundreds of thousands of African slaves into Saint-Domingue. Maintaining a sugar plantation required massive amounts of labor. The sugar plant took 18 months to mature. During that time slaves had to ensure weeds did not strangle the plant. When the cane was ready, it was cut away from the plant and dragged to a processing center on the plantation. Fires kept large cauldrons hot as the sugar cane boiled for hours during the refining process. Once the cane was harvested, the plants were burned, and new plants would take their place.
Sugar cultivation was ongoing. Cotton and tobacco had growing seasons. Sugar grew over 18 months, which allowed planters to maintain fields of sugar cane at various stages. This ensured the constant propagation, harvesting, and refining of sugar. When Africans disembarked in port cities, their new masters provided them with a two-week adjustment period. The thought was that the new slaves would acclimate to their new surroundings and would not experience illness or death once placed in the sugar fields.
The death rate for slaves in Saint-Domingue was much higher than in America. The constant state of labor killed most slaves. For those that survived their two-week acclimation period most were dead after one year. Those that survived their first year in Saint-Domingue died before they were 60. Birthrates were low and a third of the infants that survived were dead by their first birthday. When natural disasters or shipping issues prevented food from reaching the plantations, the slaves were still required to work. To state that life as a slave in Saint-Domingue was hard is a massive understatement.
As with most slave societies, owners had favorites. Slaves that had displayed special talents or trustworthiness were often granted more freedom. In 1791, trusted slaves had obtained permission of their owners to attend weekly slave dinners. Convinced that their slaves would never harm them, owners considered themselves benevolent, caring, and thoughtful toward their human possessions. The slaves saw things differently. While food may have been exchanged at these suppers, their purpose was to plan a slave uprising.
The elite slaves returned to their home plantations after their weekly meetings. Using secret codes and native African languages, plans of revolt spread from plantation to plantation among the enslaved. Whites and plantation owners had no idea what was going on. As whites openly discussed the revolutionary ideas professed in America and France, the slaves worked and listened.
The first slave uprising began in August 1791. Toussaint Louverture and other slave leaders communicated plans to set fire to the sugar crops on the north side of Saint-Domingue. From the mountains, observers watched the valley and coastal cities fill with smoke. Alarmed and unable to stop the conspirators, the colonial assembly passed a decree that outlawed the sale or distribution of any publications related to or about the French Revolution. Unaware of their own role in the slave uprising, plantation owners forced the colony to pass a decree that prohibited any person traveling from France to set foot in Saint-Domingue. As house slaves served their owners, they heard discussions of revolutionary events in France that were spread along the communication network from plantation to plantation.
For over a month slaves had set fire to the sugar fields. When the crops were destroyed the slaves left for camps as their owners began to flee the colony. Plantation owners in the southern and western sections of Saint-Domingue continued to import African slaves. The idea was that if the slaves on these plantations worked harder, the burning of the sugar plants in the north would have little impact. Instead, the continued importation of Africans became a catalyst for continued revolt.
By March 1792, the National Assembly in Paris had declared that all free blacks in Saint-Domingue that met the requirements have the same rights as their white counterparts. In the colony, there were now free blacks, enslaved blacks, and white plantation owners. Slaves in revolt now turned their attention to slaughtering their white owners. Suddenly, the one thing that slave masters feared the most was happening in the French colony. Slaves were in open and violent rebellion and they were killing their owners.
At the request of the colonial government, France sent troops to end the slave revolt. The troops began indiscriminately to massacre slaves residing in the insurgent camps. Outraged and without the use of modern eighteenth-century weapons, slaves in revolt used unconventional methods against the French troops. Poisonous arrows pierced the skin of Frenchmen while releasing homemade toxins into the body that resulted in a slow and painful death. Slaves would lure troops into the woods claiming a desire to negotiate a ceasefire. When the troops arrived, they were bludgeoned to death with homemade clubs, axes, and hand-to-hand combat. Slaves hid along the sides of roads and threw homemade weapons into the path of the unsuspecting marching troops. Soldiers were wounded with little hope for medical treatment.
By 1793, Saint-Domingue was in utter chaos. As French troops moved into Europe and the Caribbean to defend the new Republic, white planters fled the violence. Many plantation owners in Saint-Domingue crowded onto merchant ships, disembarking in American ports with nothing but the clothes on their backs and horrific stories of a slave uprising. Planters in the American South were terrified and began limiting the movement of their own slaves. Meanwhile, the violence in Saint-Domingue increased.
More parties became involved in the violence. The Spanish covertly supplied weapons to the slaves. The hope was that the revolt would fail, permitting Spain to take possession of Saint-Domingue. Spain would then have possession of the entire island of Hispaniola. America declared the revolt a treasonous act against the new French Republic and began to defend its ports in the Gulf of Mexico with more vigor. France continued to send troops, and Great Britain did everything in its power to deter those troops.
The French colony was a mess. It was under control of the rebelling slaves who believed that they were claiming the island in the name of all those who were enslaved. As such, no white person could set foot on the island. Sugar crops in the North were burned and the plantations decimated. In an act of desperation, Toussant Louverture forced insurgent slaves back to their plantations to work the land for no wages while pleading with former white plantation owners to return to assist in the cultivation of new sugar crops. Violence erupted between two factions of emancipated slaves. By 1802, Saint-Domingue was controlled solely by emancipated slaves. France had lost its most profitable and important colony.
The emancipated revolutionaries had expelled the French. As French troops and the last white residents sailed away from the port of Le Cap in November 1803, generals met to discuss the creation of a new nation. On January 1, 1804, a declaration of independence stated that Saint-Domingue was no more. In its place was a new nation, Haiti. It rose out of the ashes of what had been, just fifteen years earlier, the world’s most profitable sugar colony.
The slave revolutionaries had ousted the French at an extreme cost. World governments refused to acknowledge the new nation and withheld access to capital. The earth in Haiti had been scorched and was slow to recover. There was no capital. The government had no money to pay laborers, and laborers had no money to purchase land. Haiti would never again see the profits it once did as a French colony.