The Haitian Revolution: Independence, 1804
1804 · event
On 1 January 1804, in the coastal town of Gonaives, independence was proclaimed for a country that took back an Indigenous name, Haiti. It was the end of a struggle that had lasted thirteen years and the beginning of the first state in history founded by people who had freed themselves from slavery, and the first independent nation in Latin America.
The colony had been called Saint Domingue and was the most profitable possession in the world, producing a large share of the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe, worked by around half a million enslaved people under conditions that killed a high proportion of them within a few years of arrival. The revolt began in the northern plains in August 1791. Out of it rose Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man who became a general and administrator, defeated Spanish and British forces and governed the colony while slavery was abolished by revolutionary France.
In 1802 an expedition was sent to restore the old order. Toussaint was arrested and taken to France, where he died in a fortress prison in the Jura in April 1803. The war continued under Jean Jacques Dessalines, and the decisive battle was fought at Vertieres in November of that year.
Independence was not followed by acceptance. Slave holding states refused to recognise Haiti, and in 1825 France demanded an enormous indemnity in exchange for recognition, a debt that Haiti finished paying only in the twentieth century and that drained the new country for generations. The revolution nonetheless changed the argument everywhere. It proved that the freedom being proclaimed in Paris and Philadelphia could be claimed by those it had been written to exclude.