22 - Overview of the Haitian Revolution

Summary

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was a key turning point in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. The most successful rebellion by enslaved people in world history, it prompted the first direct colonial representation in a European legislature and created the second independent state in the Americas. Broad-based liberation from slavery won on the battlefield, ratified with the emancipation decrees of 1793-1794, and secured with the 1802-1803 war of independence, served as a continuing reminder of the possibility of emancipation while pressing key questions about the proper structure of post-slavery reconstruction. Haiti was also the first independent state in the Caribbean and Latin America, and the first in the Western Hemisphere to be led by people of African descent. Haitian approaches to governance also paralleled French, Latin American, and U.S. debates about monarchy and authority, liberty and empire, and popular sovereignty and social order. Meanwhile, white U.S. and French responses to Haiti’s successes prompted many revolutionaries in those countries to curtail their ideas about the universalism of revolution.