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  Slaves died in stunning numbers in the colony; each year, between 5 and 10 percent of the slave population succumbed to overwork and disease. Death outpaced births, and only a constant stream of imports sustained the laboring population. Some contemporaries were dismayed by the brutality and inefficiency of the system. They proposed reforms they hoped would increase the locally born slave population: a few weeks of rest from field labor for pregnant women, and rewards for those who had several children. But it was cheaper to let slaves die and buy more from Africa, so that is what the planters did.

  Of the half-million slaves in Saint-Domingue on the eve of the 1791 revolt, about 330,000 had been born and raised in Africa. Most of them were quite recent arrivals; more than 40,000 had stepped off the slave ships just the previous year. Their African background—as well as their experience of the Middle Passage and plantation labor—shaped their politics, their practices, and their hopes for what life after slavery should be like. Though they were at the bottom of the social pyramid, they profoundly influenced the society’s culture and therefore its future.7

  The largest number of slaves in the colony came from the central African region broadly known as the Kongo. Captured by slave raiders or in battle, they were shipped to Africa’s Atlantic coast and then loaded onto slave ships for the weeks-long voyage to Saint-Domingue. Arriving in Saint-Domingue, they found themselves in a cosmopolitan world, a mélange of different languages and cultures. None of them would likely have defined themselves as “Africans,” but rather as members of particular groups or kingdoms: Kongo, Ibo, Fon, Poulards. And the newcomers were immediately mixed with enslaved people who were “creoles,” born in the colony itself. Creoles and African-born slaves had very different perspectives, to be sure, but at the same time they also shared a great deal. Most creole slaves, after all, had African parents, while the African arrivals necessarily became creolized, part of a New World culture in formation. “I’m a Creole-Kongo,” a Vodou song declares.8

  As they suffered together through the trauma of plantation life, Africans and creoles developed their own rituals of healing, mourning, and worship. Such ceremonies, along with dances and communal meals held on the margins of plantations, carved out a place where the enslaved could temporarily escape the order that saw them only as chattel property. The rituals combined religious practices from a wide variety of African traditions, including Christianity: the royalty of the Kongo had converted to Catholicism in the sixteenth century, and that religion was widely practiced in the region. Over time, the hybrid form of worship became known by the West African name of Vodou. It was an extremely open and fluid religion, welcoming new arrivals. Contemporary Vodou bears the traces of this openness: its pantheon includes many different lwa, or gods, who share certain rituals but also retain their distinctiveness. The different nanchons—nations—of lwa bear signs of their varied origins in different parts of Africa, and Vodou songs often emphasize the way in which many groups came together to create one common tradition of worship. One, called “Sou Lan Mè”—“On the Ocean”—uses the experience of the Middle Passage as a metaphor for the broader creation of a new life in Haiti. In the hold of the ship, on the turbulent waters of the Atlantic, it announces, “we all became one.” Sung within Vodou ceremonies, the song is another reminder of the way in which the new culture was born out of a common experience of captivity, exile, and ultimately resistance.9

  Saint-Domingue also gave birth to a new language: Kreyòl. What began as a rough-hewn form of communication for the linguistically diverse population of the colony—speakers of French, dialects such as Breton, and different African languages—became the native tongue of most children in the colony, slave and free alike, who developed and solidified the language. By the mid-eighteenth century, Kreyòl was spoken by almost everyone in Saint-Domingue, from wealthy masters to African-born slaves. It was the lingua franca of the plantations and the towns alike, and poetry, songs, and plays were written and performed in Kreyòl.10

  Born in the harsh world of the plantations, these cultural achievements turned out to be potent political weapons. Masters and officials had always tried to contain the slave majority as much as possible. Colonial laws restricted the movement of slaves, mostly keeping them under constant surveillance on the plantation, and severely punishing any runaways, known as maroons. But slaves nonetheless found opportunities to circulate and thereby build connections with slaves from other plantations. The development of Kreyòl and Vodou facilitated such connections, creating communities of trust that stretched between different plantations and into the towns. These communities were what made it ultimately possible for the conspirators of 1791 to organize a coordinated assault on masters, sugar, and slavery.

  The 1791 uprising also drew on a particularly useful skill that many of the recently arrived slaves had brought across the Atlantic. The slaves who arrived in Saint-Domingue from central Africa in the late eighteenth century came from a region torn apart by civil wars. Many were former soldiers, sold to European slavers after being captured in battle. They were well versed in the use of firearms and experienced in military tactics involving small, mobile, autonomous units. The governors and masters of Saint-Domingue had seen only living merchandise stepping off the African ships docked in their harbors, and they were confident that their methods for controlling these slaves would work as they always had in colonies throughout the Americas. What the masters didn’t see was that the boats had brought literally thousands of soldiers to their shores. The new arrivals carried in their minds all the tactics and experience required to start—and win—a war. All they needed were weapons and an opportunity.11

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  In the middle of 1789, news of the French Revolution began arriving in Saint-Domingue from across the Atlantic. The upheaval in France sent shock waves throughout the world, but it created a particularly significant opening in Saint-Domingue. It weakened the French empire’s central government and its system of colonial rule. At the same time, the revolution produced and sent into circulation a new, radical language of rights that could be put to use in contesting the existing social order. Among the first to take advantage of this new situation were Saint-Domingue’s free people of color, who saw an opportunity to remedy their exclusion from the colony’s political life. It was their initiative that launched what can be considered the first stage of the Haitian Revolution—though no one at the time would likely have predicted that these events would lead to the end of slavery, and eventually of the colony itself.

  In the prospering territory of Saint-Domingue, many free people of color had become quite wealthy. White planters who fathered children with their slaves rarely acknowledged the mixed-race offspring officially, but it was relatively common practice to free them and give them land. By the time of the revolution, some families of color had been free for two or three generations. They bought their own plantations and slaves, and they became particularly involved in the colony’s lesser crops: indigo, cotton, and especially coffee. The plains that were best for cultivating sugar were mostly controlled by French colonists, but even in the mid-eighteenth century there was still plenty of land to be had in the mountains of Saint-Domingue, and these plots were ideal for coffee growing. Some free people of color who got into the coffee boom early made fortunes as a result; others invested in waterfront property in Port-au-Prince and ended up perfectly positioned to become successful merchants in the port town. Since there were almost no schools in the colony, such families often sent their children to France, where they received elite educations.12

  Of course, not all free people of color were wealthy; some of them led a very modest existence on the margins of free society. And not all were creoles: the group also included African-born men and women who had managed to gain their freedom. But rich or poor, light-skinned or not, all the free people of color were discriminated against by a set of laws which constantly reminded them that, simply because they were not white, they were a step below in the colonial hi
erarchy. They were prevented from practicing law and medicine, from holding local administrative positions, even from buying luxury clothes and furniture. Starting in 1784, an activist named Julien Raimond repeatedly petitioned the royal government to strike down these laws, but to no avail. After 1789, leading free people of color in the colony took advantage of the new political context to again demand equality with whites. They didn’t attack the institution of slavery itself—after all, wealth in Saint-Domingue was rooted in slavery, and many of them were slaveholders themselves—but they insisted that there should no longer be racial distinctions between free people in the colonies.

  Despite the French Revolution’s egalitarian rhetoric, the Saint-Domingue planters and the French government refused to make any serious concessions to the free people of color. As a few lucid observers at the time realized, this was a major strategic mistake. When pamphlets and lobbying in Paris failed, free men of color took up arms in their cause. They had long made up the majority of the militia and police in the colony and thus had ready access to weapons. Their first uprising, led by a man named Vincent Ogé, was crushed, and in 1790 Ogé was captured and publicly broken on the wheel. After this defeat, some of Ogé’s companions proposed increasing the size of their forces by arming their plantation slaves. As skirmishes erupted throughout the colony, free men of color began leading their slaves into battle. Whites responded in kind. Soon, slaves everywhere were being given weapons and asked to fight on one side or another of a steadily expanding conflict.

  Suddenly, what had begun as an intense but contained struggle over social privileges among the free population of Saint-Domingue had expanded to involve the other nine-tenths of the population. The colony, where the slaves vastly outnumbered their owners, had long been a tinderbox, and the French Revolution had now tossed a match into it. Within a few months, the slaves would no longer be fighting on behalf of their masters, but for themselves.

  At a religious ceremony held in August 1791, slave conspirators in the north of Haiti finalized their plans for insurrection. Among those who oversaw the ceremony was an enslaved man named Boukman, who emerged as the movement’s main early leader. He and his network of conspirators organized the uprising brilliantly, and when a few days later the slaves rose up simultaneously on sugar plantations throughout the north, they took the colonial power structure by surprise. As the insurgents swept across the plain setting fire to cane fields, their terrorized masters fled to the port town of Le Cap. Boukman was killed in an engagement with French forces, but his fellow fighters pressed on, and one by one the world’s most profitable plantations became military camps for a new army of insurgent slaves.

  The insurrection’s leaders knew that the odds were massively against them. Slave revolts had broken out constantly in plantation societies, but they had been essentially suicide missions. The rebels knew that slavery was everywhere: behind any one group of masters or troop of soldiers there was always another. If they were to succeed, they would need strong allies.

  The Saint-Domingue insurgents found such allies in the colony’s free people of color, many of whom decided that joining the slave revolt was their best chance for gaining equal rights from the French government. The alliance was a potent one, bringing together the military skills of enslaved Africans with those of colonial soldiers and police. At first, the rebelling slaves had mainly used the tools of their labor—machetes and cane knives—as weapons, though they also found some pistols and rifles on the plantations. Free people of color, however, brought rifles and even cannon into the insurgent camps.

  Many of the revolutionaries were intent on vengeance, and one infamous leader named Jeannot ordered the whites whom he captured to be whipped and tortured. But other slaves understood that such actions were a political liability. They ordered Jeannot to stop and, when he didn’t, executed him. In fact, many white prisoners found that, while they were certainly threatened by their captors, they were treated relatively well. Several were recruited as secretaries, writing letters for the insurgent leaders.

  One of the most prominent advocates for humane treatment of whites was Toussaint Bréda, who, early in the conflict, had taken on a new and soon legendary last name: Louverture. Like many of those who became leaders in the revolution, he had known life in several different strata of the colonial society in Saint-Domingue. Born a slave, he had served as a coachman on a large sugar plantation in the north of the colony. He received some education from his godfather—a free man of color—and was given his freedom as a relatively young man. He did well for himself, managing a small plantation near Le Cap and briefly owning his own slave. At the beginning of the insurrection, he helped his white former masters to safety before joining the rebels, an act that earned him valuable trust among local planters and for which he was long lauded by his biographers. Louverture was a consummate tactician and a tireless negotiator, whose brilliant military and political strategies shaped the insurrection into a powerful, even unstoppable force. One of the most dramatic figures in the history of the modern world, he was at once frightening and fascinating to his contemporaries.13

  Louverture astutely made use of the geopolitical conflicts of the moment. European empires shared a common commitment to slavery, but they also coveted one another’s Caribbean territories and had fought unceasingly over them for centuries. When the slave uprising began in 1791, England and Spain both saw it as a marvelous opportunity to take over the coveted colony of Saint-Domingue. The Spanish, working from across the border in Santo Domingo, reached out to the slave insurgents, offering to give them weapons and commissions as Spanish officers if they would help secure the colony for Spain. Louverture took advantage of the proffered weaponry, which turned his army into a powerful military force. Later, when he no longer needed the Spanish, he unceremoniously turned on them and drove them from the colony.

  The English unwittingly assisted the insurgents in their own way. In their bid for control of the colony they reached out to French planters, who by 1792 were increasingly suspicious of the French state—now in the hands of the radicals, some of them prominent abolitionists. Several of the planters made it clear that they would be willing to support England’s ambitions for Saint-Domingue in order to preserve slavery in the colony. Dealing with France’s enemy, however, created a significant new opening for the slave insurgents. The isolated French governors of the island, facing the possibility of mass treason among white planters, found they had no one to turn to for preventing the loss of the colony except the revolutionaries themselves.

  In June 1793, two French Republican commissioners—Léger Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel—made a stunning decision. Reaching out to the armies of slave insurgents that surrounded Le Cap, the commissioners promised that if these rebels fought for the French Republic, they would be granted freedom and citizenship. The first to respond were a group of rebels led by an elderly Kongo-born man named Pierrot. He became an officer in the French army, his troops Republican soldiers. Other insurgents soon followed, shoring up the vulnerable position of the French commissioners. Understanding their power, the insurgents pressed for their families to be freed as well, and Sonthonax and Polverel agreed to do so, steadily expanding their offer. Still, many rebels, including Toussaint Louverture, remained aloof and kept fighting on the side of the Spanish and against the French. Under pressure from the insurgents and desperate to secure the loyalty of the population of Saint-Domingue, Sonthonax and Polverel took an even more radical step in August 1793: they abolished all slavery in the colony outright.14

  A delegation of elected representatives from Saint-Domingue, including the African-born Jean-Baptiste Belley, traveled to Paris and presented the news to the National Convention. They argued forcefully that emancipation was both morally right and strategically vital. While white planters had happily consorted with England, France’s enemy, the black former slaves in the colony had made themselves the Republic’s most valuable and steadfast defenders in the Caribbean. The
delegates were so persuasive that in February 1794, the Convention decreed slavery abolished not just in Saint-Domingue but throughout the former French empire. They extended the rights of French citizenship to “all men, of all colors,” creating the legal foundations for the first multiracial democracy in the New World.

  It was a remarkable victory for the revolutionaries of the Caribbean. By crafting an alliance with progressive forces in France, they had managed to convert to their cause the government of one of the most powerful empires on earth, whose fortunes had been built on the foundation of slavery. It was an action without precedent, and without preparation. No one in France, not even the more radical abolitionists, had envisioned that slavery would be abolished as suddenly as it was in Saint-Domingue. None had imagined that the former slaves would gain not just freedom but also the rights of citizenship. France’s abolition of slavery did not grow out of French abolitionists’ plans and deliberations; rather, it was the direct result of the 1791 slave uprising and the successful military campaign waged over the course of two years by an army of determined insurgents.

  But the dramatic victory also created major problems. What would the economy of Saint-Domingue look like after slavery? How would the plantation system work? Broadly united in a common struggle for liberation, the coalition that won freedom in 1793 would find itself deeply divided over precisely what that freedom should mean.

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  How do you get from slavery to freedom? Throughout the nineteenth century, the question haunted and challenged many political leaders. But it initially arose in all its complexity in Saint-Domingue, where it fell to Toussaint Louverture to manage the first large-scale emancipation process in the Americas. As soon as he heard that the National Convention had abolished slavery throughout the empire, Louverture rapidly rallied to the French side. Having established himself as the main leader of the insurrection, he now became a French general. Within a few years, he was named the governor general of the colony by the French government.