The 1791 Revolution
The Haitian Revolution represents the most thorough case study of revolutionary change anywhere in the history of the modern world. In ten years of sustained internal and international warfare, a colony populated predominantly by plantation slaves overthrew both its colonial status and its economic system and established a new political state of entirely free individuals—with some ex-slaves constituting the new political authority. As only the second state to declare its independence in the Americas, Haiti had no viable administrative models to follow. The British North Americans who declared their independence in 1776 left slavery intact, and theirs was more a political revolution than a social and economic one. The success of Haiti against all odds made social revolutions a sensitive issue among the leaders of political revolt elsewhere in the Americas during the final years of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century. Continue
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Most
historians will agree that the Saint Domingue
revolution beginning in 1791 represents the
biggest, and most influential moment in history.
By 1804, all of the white and much of the old
colored planter class simply vanished from this
newborn country. The armies of the three most
powerful Atlantic empires were shattered in the
course of a decade. Westerners, especially
conservative Americans, repute this idea of a
free “black republic” forgetting two
centuries before they exterminated the entire
native population of Ayiti.
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