The Haitian Revolution, also known as the Haitian War of Independence, was a successful insurrection by enslaved Africans against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign state of Haiti. The revolution was one of the only known slave rebellions in human history that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery (though not from forced labour) and ruled by former captives.
A colony built on slavery
Much of Caribbean economic development in the 18th century was contingent on Europeans' demand for sugar. Plantation owners produced sugar as a commodity crop from cultivation of sugarcane, which required extensive labor. The colony of Saint-Domingue also had extensive coffee, cocoa and indigo plantations, but these were smaller and less profitable than the sugar plantations. The commodity crops were traded for European goods. Starting in the 1730s, French engineers constructed complex irrigation systems to increase sugarcane production.
By the following decade, Saint-Domingue, together with the British colony of Jamaica, had become the main suppliers of the world's sugar. Production of sugar depended on extensive manual labor provided by enslaved Africans. In 1789, Saint-Domingue produced 60% of the world's coffee and 40% of the sugar imported by France and Britain. The colony was not only the most profitable possession of the French colonial empire, but it was the wealthiest and most prosperous colony in the Caribbean. The colony's white population numbered 40,000; Mulattoes and free Blacks, 28,000; and Black slaves, an estimated 452,000.
The colony’s enslaved population was almost half the total slave population in the Caribbean, estimated at one million that year. Enslaved Blacks, regarded as the lowest class of colonial society, outnumbered whites and free people of color by a margin of almost eight to one. Two-thirds of the slaves were African born.
Rebellion and the abolition of slavery
Guillaume Raynal attacked slavery in the 1780 edition of his history of European colonization. He also predicted a general slave revolt in the colonies, saying that there were signs of "the impending storm". One such sign was the action of the French revolutionary government to grant citizenship to wealthy free people of color in May 1791. Since white planters refused to comply with this decision, within two months isolated fighting broke out between the Mulattoes and the whites. This added to the tense climate between Mulattoes and grands blancs.
Enslaved Black people, already resentful of both whites and Mulattoes for maintaining the system of bondage, began to see their own opportunity for rebellion. To prevent military disaster, and secure the colony for republican France as opposed to Britain, Spain, and French royalists, separately or in combination, the French commissioners Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel offered freedom to the slaves who would agree to fight alongside them. Then, under pressure, they gradually emancipated all the slaves of the colony. On 29 August 1793, Sonthonax proclaimed the abolition of slavery in the northern province.
On 31 October, Étienne Polverel did the same in the other two western and southern provinces. Sonthonax sent three of his deputies, namely the colonist Louis Duffay, the free Black army officer Jean-Baptiste Belley and a free man of color, Jean-Baptiste Mills, to seek the National Convention's endorsement for the emancipation of slaves near the end of January 1794.
The struggle for independence
For a few months, the island was quiet under Napoleonic rule. But when it became apparent that the French intended to re-establish slavery (because they had nearly done so on Guadeloupe), Black cultivators revolted in the summer of 1802. Yellow fever had decimated the French; by the middle of July 1802, the French lost about 10,000 dead to yellow fever. By September, the French expedition's commander, Charles Leclerc, wrote in his diary that he had only 8,000 fit men left as yellow fever had killed the others.
Leclerc's successor, Donatien de Rochambeau, seeing defeat inevitable, procrastinated until the last possible moment, but eventually was forced to surrender to the British commander—by the end of the month the garrison was starving, having reached the conclusion at a council of war that surrender was the only way to escape from this "place of death". Commodore Loring, however, refused the French permission to sail and agreed terms with Haitian commander Jean-Jacques Dessalines that permitted them to safely evacuate provided they had left the port by 1 December.
On 1 January 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed Haiti's independence at Gonaïves. The generals and chiefs assembled there declared him governor-general for life in the same independence document. This declaration preceded the imperial constitution of 1805. Independence was followed by the massacre of most remaining white inhabitants. Years of war had devastated agriculture and disrupted commerce, leaving the new state with an immense rebuilding task. Freedom from slavery also did not end coercive labor policies: Dessalines sought to restore production through compulsory agricultural work and military discipline, dividing citizens into the categories of laborer and soldier.