ON THIS DAY ·
Haitian Revolution begins in Saint-Domingue
On the night of 22–23 August the enslaved of Saint-Domingue’s northern plain rise; within months more than a thousand estates lie in ruins and the only successful slave revolution in history has begun.
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The moment in context
Revolution in France split the colony’s free population along the lines of the last chapter, and each group took its claims to Paris. Planters formed colonial assemblies, elected councils of white colonists much like a state legislature, the boldest at Saint-Marc in 1790, which demanded control of the colony’s laws and treated slavery and race as matters for colonists alone. In Paris the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, an anti-slavery club founded in 1788 that worked much like a modern campaign group lobbying a parliament, pressed the rights of free people of colour, the colony’s free population of African or mixed descent, while the planters’ lobby fought them. Vincent Ogé, a merchant of colour who had argued his case in Paris, came home secretly, the route the arrow traces from the north, and raised a few hundred armed men near Grande-Rivière in October 1790. He did not call for abolition. Defeated within days, Ogé and his comrade Jean-Baptiste Chavannes fled into Spanish Santo Domingo, whose officials handed them back, and Ogé and Chavannes were broken on the wheel at Le Cap in February 1791, a punishment meant as a warning that made them martyrs.
From Outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, chapter 2 of Two Roads to Independence: Haiti 1789–1838 and Kenya 1895–1978 (1791).
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Rights declared for all and applied to few. The Declaration of the Rights of Man spoke of all men, yet the National Assembly depended on the colonial trade and hesitated to apply it to…
- The turn — Bois Caïman and the night of 22 August 1791. The rising that followed the gathering at Bois Caïman is the hinge of this chapter, and of the whole Haitian road, because it turned a quarrel among…
- What it changed — War across the North. The insurgent armies held the northern mountains and much of the plain through 1792, resisting the colonial militias and the troops sent from…
Then ask the room: Did the French Revolution cause the Haitian Revolution? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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