The Haitian Revolution began

On the night of 21–22 August 1791, the enslaved workers of northern Saint-Domingue rose against the planters who held them. The French colony was the richest in the Caribbean, its sugar and coffee fortunes built on brutal forced labour. Within days, the rebels seized the northern plantations and torched the estates, and the uprising would not stop until it had remade the colony entirely.

The revolt grew into a thirteen-year war. The general Toussaint Louverture emerged as its commanding figure, and after his capture his lieutenants pressed on, defeating even a Napoleonic expedition sent to restore slavery.

For the first time, a slave revolt had ended in the total defeat of the colonial power.

On 1 January 1804 the victors declared independence and renamed the country Haiti. It became the second independent republic in the Americas after the United States, and the only nation ever born of a successful slave revolt.