Haiti’s Constitution of 1805 states that “Slavery is forever abolished.”  The historical path leading up to this declaration had been traveled for over three centuries.

In 1492 Christopher Columbus and his crew had landed on the shore of this island in the Caribbean.  Over the next several decades, the Spanish colonists, intent on profiting from their “discovery” of “the New World,” invaded the villages of the native Taino population, terrorizing men and women and putting them to work in gold mines and on plantations.  Almost all of the Taino died, victimized also by smallpox and other European diseases.  To replace them, the Spanish enslaved Africans and brought them to the island.

This system of exploitation, which was taken over by France  near the beginning of the 18th century, was extraordinarily harsh, maintained through whipping, mutilating, hanging, and other forms of cruelty.  There had always been resistance by those enslaved, but prior to 1791, the rebellions had always been brutally and successfully put down by the masters.

Then in 1789 a revolution erupted in France itself, and news reached Saint Domingue (which was the  name France had given to the island) about the French “Declaration of Human Rights,” proclaiming that “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.”  This elevated principle was put into practice very unevenly in France and also in the newly formed United States, which would continue to support the institution of slavery until Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1862.  Nevertheless, the ideals of freedom and justice voiced during the American and French Revolutions did encourage protest on the part of the white population on the Caribbean island.  They resented the high tariffs imposed by France upon products purchased from abroad and other colonial policies of economic and political control.

Also joining in protest against French rule were “people of color,” as the mixed-race population was called.  But it was the uprising of enslaved Blacks in August 1791 that initiated the fight on the ground for emancipation.

A French ship discharges soldiers on the shore of Haiti, amid “horrible carnage, fires, devastation.”

By the beginning of 1792 Black revolutionary forces had gained control of about a third of the island, and they continued to win victories thereafter.  The violence wreaked by both sides was massive.  During the thirteen years prior to their declaration of independence in 1804, about half of the 500,000 Blacks and 25,000 of the 40,000 whites, were killed in the fighting.

But the revolutionaries eventually prevailed, and they renamed the island “Haiti” (meaning “land of mountains” in the indigenous Taino language).  Although the founders of this Black republic agreed with the declared ideals of the U.S. and French revolutions, they went beyond these models in seeking to build a nation in which every person, unconditionally and without exception, would be free.

In both the United States and France, the revolutionary slogan “All men are created equal” did not apply to those who were enslaved, to women, or to those without property.  In fact slavery would not end in the United States until Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, long after the Haitian Constitution of 1805 had pronounced slavery dead.

The Haitian Revolution, which clearly demonstrated the ability of the Black rebels to out-think and out-organize their enemies, frightened the slave owning classes throughout the Americas, including the United States.