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1491
The Beginning
Haitian Revolution was on an Island called Haiti. The first people to find it was slaves that have gotten free in 1491. The were free for a little until White people came and were meanies to them. -
1492
How it Started
The Spanish began to enslave the native Taino and Ciboney people soon after December 1492, when Italian navigator Christopher Columbus sighted the island that he called La Isla Española. The island’s indigenous population, forced to mine for gold, was devastated by European diseases and brutal working conditions, and by the end of the 16th century, the people had virtually vanished. Thousands of slaves imported from other Caribbean islands met the same fate. -
What happened to them?
After the main gold mines were exhausted, the Spanish were succeeded by the French, who established their own permanent settlements, including Port-de-Paix (1665) in the northwest, and the French West Indies Corporation took control of the area. Landowners in western Hispaniola imported increasing numbers of African slaves, who totaled about 5,000 in the late 17th century. -
How did it happen?
By 1789 the estimated population of Saint-Domingue, as the French called their colony, was 556,000 and included roughly 500,000 African slaves, 32,000 European colonists, and 24,000 affranchis (free mulattoes [people of mixed African and European descent] or blacks). -
What's is after that?
In the late 1790s Toussaint Louverture, a military leader and former slave, gained control of several areas and earned the initial support of French agents. He gave nominal allegiance to France while pursuing his own political and military designs, which included negotiating with the British, and in May 1801 he had himself named “governor-general for life.” -
It never Stopped
In May 1791 the French revolutionary government granted citizenship to the wealthier affranchis, but Haiti’s European population disregarded the law. Within two months isolated fighting broke out between Europeans and affranchis, and in August thousands of slaves rose in rebellion -
What did they do?
The Europeans attempted to appease the mulattoes in order to quell the slave revolt, and the French assembly granted citizenship to all affranchis in April 1792. The country was torn by rival factions, some of which were supported by Spanish colonists in Santo Domingo (on the eastern side of the island, which later became the Dominican Republic) or by British troops from Jamaica. -
Where they ever free?
In 1793 a commissioner, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, was sent from France to maintain order and offered freedom to slaves who joined his army; he soon abolished slavery altogether, a decision confirmed the following year by the French government. -
Did anyone surrender?
Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe led a black army against the French in 1802, following evidence that Napoleon intended to restore slavery in Saint-Domingue as he had done in other French possessions. They defeated the French commander and a large part of his army, and in November 1803 the Viscount de Rochambeau surrendered the remnant of the expedition. -
How did it end?
Civil war then broke out between Christophe and Alexandre Sabès Pétion, who was based at Port-au-Prince in the south. Christophe, who declared himself King Henry I in 1811, managed to improve the country’s economy but at the cost of forcing former slaves to return to work on the plantations. He built a spectacular palace as well as an imposing fortress in the hills to the south of the city of Cap-Haïtien, where, with mutinous soldiers almost at his door, he committed suicide in 1820.
