Haiti: Universal Freedom Won by the Enslaved

Saint-Domingue, France's richest colony, depended on the forced labour of roughly half a million enslaved Africans producing sugar and coffee. In August 1791 enslaved people in the northern plain rose in revolt, and the uprising grew into a long war involving France, Britain and Spain. Facing defeat, French commissioners freed the enslaved in the colony in 1793, and in February 1794 the National Convention abolished slavery in all French colonies. Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man, emerged as the leading general and governor.

When Napoleon sought to restore French control and reimposed slavery in other colonies in 1802, Haitians resisted; Louverture was captured and died in a French prison, but Jean-Jacques Dessalines led the victory that created independent Haiti on 1 January 1804. Haiti was the first state founded by formerly enslaved people, and its revolution forced the question that Paris and Philadelphia had avoided: whether the rights of man included people of African descent.