When the Haitian Revolution entered its final years, the leaders of this French colony had to grapple with two main questions. First, should they grant the newly emancipated slaves full control over their lives, or should they curtail the freedom of field hands in the name of economic recovery? Second, should Haiti (Saint-Domingue) remain under direct French rule, or should it seek some political autonomy or even outright independence? Toussaint Louverture, who dominated Saint-Domingue’s politics from 1798 until his exile in 1802, embraced a middle course, forcing field hands to toil as semi-free cultivators on their old plantations while maintaining loose political ties with France. Napoléon Bonaparte, who sent massive expeditions to French Caribbean colonies in 1802, tried to reinstitute direct French control over the colonial empire; he also restored slavery in Guadeloupe and French Guiana and seemed poised to do the same in Saint-Domingue. Louverture’s successor Jean-Jacques Dessalines ousted French forces in 1803 and declared Haiti’s independence in 1804, albeit maintaining the cultivator system that restricted the freedom of freedmen.

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.