In the late 16th Century, the island of St. Domingue with its coffee, cocoa, indigo, and cotton exports was France’s most valuable colony and, in fact, the most valuable island in the entire Caribbean. Warm temperatures and year-round humidity made it possible to grow sugarcane, a new and highly sought-after product throughout the Western world, but one that came at a great cost. Processing and growing the plant required great labor, and diseases were rampant among the enslaved Africans that made up the workforce. Because of this, conditions for enslaved people in St. Domingue were harsher and more brutal than almost anywhere else in the New World. The high mortality rate among workers meant that slavers pushed harder to get productivity before they died while also increasing import of human capital at a rapid pace to compensate.

The net result of all these factors was that by 1790 the small island was purported to have 40,000 whites, 30,000 free Blacks, and nearly 500,000 enslaved people who were growing tired of the violent treatment. Several small, scattered rebellions and skirmishes between escaped slaves and whites took place throughout the island that year, largely inspired by the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man that the French themselves had drafted. The brutal island government tried to quell these actions and make a forceful showing with the savage beheading of freed black revolutionary Vincent Ogé who had led a protest in favor of suffrage for the island’s free Black population, but this only served to inflame tensions. On August 22, 1791, a date that would henceforth be known as The Night of Fire, enslaved Africans joined with escaped Africans, called Maroons, in an organized revolt. Revolutionaries set plantations and houses to flame, and Whites – many women and children -- were murdered. This served as the opening salvo in what would become a protracted war between enslaved and free Africans and the island’s ruthless French government.

From 1791 to 1803, war raged, and bloodshed reigned. Seeking to take advantage of the destabilization of their European rivals (and divert the island’s tremendous wealth to their own coffers) the British and Spanish entered the skirmish on the side of the Africans promising to end slavery if victorious. Led by charismatic African leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, the island’s enslaved population would not back down until they succeeded in ending both the institution of slavery, as well as French control of the colony. The new nation, now named Haiti, became the first in the Western Hemisphere to successfully abolish slavery, and the first founded by formerly enslaved people. Haitian Pride in this victory is evident today, both in the annual celebration of the Haitian Declaration of Independence, signed January 1, 1804, and in the Rara music of Haitian carnaval celebrations in which “battalions” of musicians travel through villages battling one another with song, echoing the drum and fife music that Maroons were said to have played when they entered into battle with the French.