Napoleon's Fiasco: The Last Days of the Haitian Revolution
- Paul D. Wilke
- Oct 3
- 21 min read
I. Introduction
In December 1801, a fleet carrying 20,000 soldiers sailed from France, led by Napoleon’s 29-year-old brother-in-law, Charles-Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc. The objective was the recapture of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti), all but lost after the massive slave rebellion of 1791 had destroyed the white slave-owning class and much of the colony’s plantation economy.
Previously, Saint-Domingue prospered as France’s most profitable overseas possession, accounting for an estimated 40% of Europe’s sugar and 60% of its coffee. (1) It was also the largest slave population in the Americas. Napoleon aimed to return the island to its pre-insurrection prosperity, regardless of the cost.
Unfortunately for him, and even more so for the prospects of Leclerc’s mission, the former black slaves had known several years of official freedom thanks to the French Republic's banning of slavery in 1794. They kind of liked being free. The overconfident Frenchmen departing on that cold and blustery December day didn't understand this, and as a result, almost all of them, including Leclerc, would soon be dead.
They say hubris comes right before nemesis, and that's true here. Just months after arriving and confident that victory was imminent, things started going horribly wrong for the French.
It began when word arrived that Napoleon had moved to roll back emancipation. In May 1802, he passed a law restoring slavery in France's colonies. Soon after, free blacks in Guadeloupe were violently forced back into bondage. For the people of Saint-Domingue, the message was unmistakable: the French were not coming as allies but enslavers.
What should have been a mopping-up operation turned into a grinding war of attrition against an insurgency reenergized by the fact that they now knew beyond any doubt what was at stake: their freedom.
As the campaign unraveled and the fighting intensified, French forces committed some of the worst atrocities I've ever come across in all my years of reading history, which is saying something. Such cruelty provoked an equally brutal insurgent response, in what became a spiraling descent into wanton violence. It couldn't go on forever. By the end of 1803, disease and the insurgency proved too much for the French invaders.
Eventually, a few survivors straggled back to Europe to tell the white world their version of the lost cause, a one-sided tale of horrendous black war crimes against fine, upstanding white folks simply trying to supply Europe with the sugar and coffee it craved.
And who took note of these events in far-off Haiti? American slave owners, that's who, and they adjusted their approach to slavery in America to ensure nothing similar happened to them.
Reading about this conflict is shocking, and too few know this story. It's a grim one full of villains and victims, of escalating violence and no happy endings for anyone, including Haiti, which has remained mired in corruption and Great Power bullying until the present. There are no heroes here, at least none not soaked in blood and betrayal and contradictions.
The last days of the Haitian Revolution read like Blood Meridian, where murderous bands roam the land and evil reigns supreme.
But this wasn't fiction.
II. Mirage of Victory: "Victors everywhere, we possessed nothing but our rifles"
The opposition Leclerc faced in 1802 looked very different from the untrained groups that had overwhelmed the tiny white ruling class in 1791-1793. When that revolt had erupted, Saint-Domingue had 465,000 slaves, compared to only 31,000 whites and 28,000 free men of color. (2)
However, a decade of struggle against foreign invaders had left Toussaint Louverture in sole command and with a formidable field army of around 23,000 well-armed veterans. A cadre of battle-tested generals led his armies, including his two top lieutenants, Henri Christophe and Jean-Jacques Dessalines.
Louverture attempted and ultimately failed to strike a precarious balance between acknowledging at least symbolic French sovereignty and running an autonomous, black-led regime. That was possible while France remained mired in the turmoil of revolution and boxed out of the Caribbean by the British Navy. However, in 1800, Napoleon had put the Revolution out of its misery by declaring himself dictator. Likewise, a rare window of peace with Britain reopened the sea lanes for Leclerc's expedition.
Leclerc had secret instructions from Napoleon on how to execute the campaign. First, disarming flattery: He was to position himself as a champion of the blacks, telling them whatever they wanted to hear "in order to take possession of the strongholds and to get ourselves into the country" without opposition. (3) He'd proclaim his intention to respect the freedom of the black population, a right already granted by France's Republican government back in 1794.
After these false promises lulled the population into complacency, the knives would come out. Leclerc would swiftly arrest and deport the colony's black ruling class to Europe, including Louverture and any leaders of color.
Napoleon was adamant: "Do not allow any blacks having held a rank above that of captain to remain on the island." This was the only way, Napoleon claimed. Otherwise, the "beautiful colony will always be a volcano, and will inspire no confidence in capitalists, colonists, and commerce." (4)
Finally, the coup de grâce. Once Leclerc imposed total control and neutralized the leadership, he would begin reestablishing Saint-Domingue's white-owned plantation economy. The reimposition of slavery was not explicitly stated in these initial secret instructions, but as we'll see, there's powerful evidence that that was indeed the intended outcome. (5)
In any case, Leclerc's "Greeks bearing gifts" strategy did not fool Louverture. You don't show up with an armada that powerful for cooperative peacekeeping purposes.
Both sides braced for combat.
That happened soon enough. General Donatien de Rochambeau, Leclerc's deputy commander, assaulted Fort-Liberté to the east of Cap Français (also called Le Cap in some sources) on 3 February. The black defenders killed sixty attackers before being overwhelmed and surrendering. Rochambeau decided to make an example of the prisoners and executed hundreds of the survivors (6).
The French next advanced on Cap Français, the colony's largest city on the north coast. Louverture's commander, Christophe, knowing he could not hold the city, burned it to the ground and retreated into the surrounding hills. This period set the campaign's early tone. The French were superior on the battlefield—where they went, they conquered— but Louverture's forces were everywhere else, waging guerrilla attacks that sapped French strength. (7) If they couldn't hold a town, they torched it and retreated.
One French officer lamented, "Victors everywhere, we possessed nothing but our rifles." (8) He was right. Still, the French made steady gains, pushing Louverture's forces away from the coastal cities and into the mountains.
Louverture faced other challenges due to his declining popularity by 1802. After becoming the symbol of black resistance in the 1790s, he'd gradually eliminated his internal rivals before declaring himself dictator for life in 1800 and creating a constitution that forced blacks to return to their plantations to do the same work they did as slaves, though now as freemen earning a modest salary.
As the French advanced in those early months, several devastating defections hit Louverture. Leclerc soon found it was easy to peel away his opponent's top commanders.
The first to defect was Maurepas. (9) Since Leclerc was winning on the battlefield, it wasn't hard to convince many that there was no other option but to join the inevitable winners. Just promise a pardon, and let the defector keep his rank and status.
Too many, it turned out, found this line of persuasion convincing enough to betray Louverture. Weakened by these defections, he fought on, though there was a growing sense that any chance at victory was slipping away.
Still, all was not lost. He had his two best generals, Dessalines and Christophe, in the field and inflicting heavy casualties on the advancing French.
Dessalines' defense of the fort at Crête-à-Pierrot in March 1802 proved that well-led defenders could perform effectively when faced with a better-armed and trained opponent. It was one of the most dramatic episodes of the Haitian Revolution: about a thousand black and mixed-race soldiers under Dessalines held the small stone fort against the full weight of Leclerc's expeditionary army for several weeks. The French sent waves of attackers against the fort, only to be mowed down by the defenders.
Dessalines exhorted his troops with a speech recorded by a white prisoner, "Take courage, I tell you, take courage! The whites from France cannot hold out against us here in Saint-Domingue. They will fight well at first, but soon they will fall sick and die like flies." (10)
As we'll see, that last part about disease reads like a prophecy. After weeks of bombardment, assaults, and starvation, the depleted survivors cut their way out and escaped through the siege lines, turning the stand into an enduring symbol of Haitian resistance.
Leclerc lost 1,500 irreplaceable troops in the battle for that fort, or almost 8% of his original force. (11) Indeed, during the first two months of the war, and before yellow fever began its slow and steady culling of the French, combat alone dwindled Leclerc's force to a disturbing degree.
About 17,000 of the original 20,000 French force had been committed to the fighting. Although exact figures vary among historians, Cyril Lionel Robert James estimates that 5,000 were wounded and another 5,000 killed. (12) This was an unsustainable rate of attrition.
This brave stand should have inspired momentum. But something unusual began happening: Louverture's two most talented commanders abandoned him. First went Christophe, who commanded a force of 1,500 in the north. (13) On his own initiative, he reached out to Leclerc in April 1802 to signal his willingness to surrender.
The two met in Cap Français, and Christophe agreed to switch sides in return for keeping his rank as a French officer. And just like that, he and his army flipped sides. When Louverture bitterly reproached him for his treachery, he replied that "he was tired of living in the woods like a brigand." (14)
Dessalines soon followed suit. Historian Laurent Dubois is as perplexed as I am about why they were so willing to defect in April, when the outcome of the campaign was still in doubt, especially after the inspiring defense of Crête-à-Pierrot. Dubois only says, "This remains a puzzle." (15)
The defections were devastating for Louverture, who seemed to have lost hope that he could ultimately triumph as things stood that spring. Christophe's defection exposed how fragile Louverture's coalition had been all along.
He contacted Leclerc to discuss terms, and they soon met in Cap Français. Dessalines was there too. Leclerc, Louverture, Dessalines, and Christophe had dinner together after signing the surrender. It was tense but cordial, considering the circumstances.
Louverture and Dessalines received the same deal as Christophe and Maurepas—they kept their rank and were incorporated into Leclerc's army, along with their troops. Louverture retired to his plantation, as per a special side agreement with Leclerc. (16)
The hard work for the French should have been done by now, with nothing beyond stamping out some lingering resistance in the mountains. Victory was so close.
Leclerc crowed in a letter to Napoleon in early May: "My present position is beautiful and brilliant . . . all the rebel chiefs have submitted." (17)
However, stage two of the secret plan, arresting and deporting those black "chiefs," needed to be pushed back for the moment. According to Napoleon's secret instructions, Leclerc was immediately supposed to put Louverture and any black officers on a ship for
France to get them out of the way for good.
Soon, but not yet. He still needed them.
In reality, Leclerc's position wasn't so "beautiful and brilliant" after all. On the contrary, it was rather precarious. His own forces were beginning to succumb en masse to yellow fever. Combined with months of bitter fighting, it was becoming clear his resources were no longer enough. He needed his former black enemies, now turned allies, to finish the job.
I said earlier that Louverture wasn't stupid, so there may have been more going on here than a pragmatic acceptance of inevitable defeat. He had proven himself a cunning adversary over the years, someone willing to engage in subterfuge to achieve his ends. Was that the plan here?
Many, including Leclerc, distrusted this sudden change of heart, finding it a little too abrupt. How could Louverture, that heroic leader of the free blacks all those many years, that blazing symbol of black resistance to European oppression, suddenly submit after a few setbacks?
He feared that Louverture's "surrender" was merely a strategy to buy time until the rainy season's yellow fever could finish the work his armies had started.
The numbers we have back up the validity of this strategy, if indeed that's what it was. By early May, just three months after arriving, Leclerc's original force of 20,000 was down to 12,000, and he was losing between 200 and 250 more each day from disease. (18)
Time was on Louverture's side, and rumors circulated that he was in secret communication with Sylla, one of the rebel commanders who had not surrendered and was still fighting in the field. (19)
In early June, Leclerc decided to rid himself of the "gilded negro." "Toussaint is acting in bad faith," he wrote to Napoleon on June 6, "just as I expected." Leclerc tricked his foe into leaving his plantation under the pretext of needing his advice on troop dispositions. The normally suspicious Louverture fell for the trap. The French disarmed his bodyguards and packed him onto a ship bound for France, along with most of his family.
As he boarded that ship taking him to his oblivion, he declared: "In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty of the blacks; it will grow back from the roots, because they are deep and numerous." (20)
He was right, though he wouldn't live to see that day. Louverture languished for less than a year, locked away in a dank prison cell in the chilly Jura mountains before dying from an illness. ( 21)
His story ends here.
Finally, Leclerc thought, now the war should be over. Things looked good, and he had sound reasons to feel optimistic. Even better, Dessalines and Christophe had thrown themselves into their new role as his commanders.
He bragged in a letter to Napoleon, "The Blacks have lost their compass [Louverture]. They are all divided amongst themselves. Sure, a few protested Louverture's deportation, but they had been rounded up and "shot or deported." (22)
So, that was that. Louverture was off the board, and resistance was fragmented.
Yet final victory still eluded the French.
III. Slavery, Again - "Liberty is a food for which the stomachs of the negroes are not yet prepared." - Colonial Minister Decrés
Until mid-1802, Leclerc could still pretend he meant to preserve freedom. Napoleon shattered that illusion by annulling the Republic's 1794 abolition law, a blunder that left Leclerc confronting a reinvigorated rebellion.
This was the culmination of a lobbying campaign waged by dispossessed planters who gradually won over Napoleon, a man always looking for more money to fund his campaigns. They reminded him of the colony's pre-revolution profitability, which one estimate puts at 180 million francs a year. (23)
On 2 July 1802, a new law barred blacks from entering metropolitan France. (24) Colonial Minister Decrés made plain the logic: "I want slaves in our colonies. Liberty is a food for which the stomachs of the negroes are not yet prepared. We must seize any occasion to give them back their natural food [slavery], except for the seasonings required by justice and humanity." (25)
That's nice, isn't it? Quite witty.
Napoleon put it more bluntly, making what would become over the next century a standard talking point to justify racist imperialism: "We know how the illusion of liberty and equality were propagated in these far-off countries, where the remarkable differences between men who are civilized and those who are not, and the difference in climates, colors, and habits, and, most important, the security of European families, inevitably require great difference in the civil and political state of people." (26)
Most disturbing was what happened in France's colony of Guadeloupe. Slavery was reimposed through a consular decree on 16 July 1802. This occurred after the French commander on that island, Richepance, had crushed a short revolt that ended after the last holdouts heroically blew themselves up on a plantation rather than submit to enslavement again. Richepance then conducted mass executions and deportations, including among them were men of color who had fought for him to defeat the recent rebellion. Several Guadeloupean deportees escaped from prison ships and made their way to Saint-Domingue, where they told their horrific tale. (27)
The implications were now quite clear: their fate would be the same, which would be slavery for the blacks and deportation or death for their leaders. As the rumors spread like wildfire, Leclerc began to lose control of the situation.
We can see this in his increasingly frantic pleas to Paris in the following months. In August, he begged Napoleon to "not do anything" that might make people "fear for their liberty." That same month, he wrote to the colonial minister, Decrés, pleading for a delay. Do not consider reestablishing slavery here for some time." Let his successor do that. In the meantime, Leclerc would lay the groundwork for that eventuality. (28)
He worried about his credibility, as he'd been loudly and proudly guaranteeing the liberty of Saint-Domingue's people since his arrival. But the time for bullshitting was over. It was obvious what the French wanted to do, and now everyone knew it. Napoleon's reimposition of slavery had been premature. The mask was off.
Now the war entered its Blood Meridian phase.
IV. Leclerc's Choice: "Nothing left but terror"
By the late summer of 1802, Leclerc was still losing hundreds of soldiers a day to yellow fever. He had become reliant on Dessalines and Christophe's black forces to maintain order. Leclerc was uncomfortably aware of his growing dependence on troops led by former enemies.
Counterintuitively, given his prior role as Louverture's top general and France's fiercest enemy, Dessalines now seemed to embrace his role as Leclerc's hammer. His brutality had earned him the nickname ' the Butcher of the blacks' for the zeal with which he turned on his old allies. That's an understatement.
In August, Dessalines overran an insurgent camp and then bragged afterward, "I had a few hung, and others shot." In another letter, he boasted about the "desolation and terror" he was causing. (29) One gets the sense that Dessalines reveled in violence to a disturbing extent, and as long as he had the right permission structure in place, he was indiscriminate as to his targets.
Yet, at the same time, there's evidence that he was playing both sides. Leclerc's priority that summer was disarming the population. While Dessalines was committing atrocities for the French, he was working to undermine them. He publicly confiscated weapons and then secretly gave them back to the insurgent leaders.
For the moment, though, Christophe and Dessalines still fought for France, though other colonial troops under French command were beginning to melt away and join the insurgency. Leclerc lamented how he had lost any "moral power" over the populace, who now saw the struggle unambiguously as one between freedom and slavery.
Leclerc's conclusion from this barrage of bad news was that he had "nothing left but terror" because his opponents were fanatics who chose death over surrender. (30) No episode bears this out more than the story of Jacmel's black garrison, which, to that point, had served France loyally, even staying at their posts while others defected.
Suspecting them of treason nonetheless, he had them arrested and crammed into the hull of a ship to be transported to a prison in Port-au-Prince. All but three strangled themselves, preferring suicide to imprisonment and near-certain death. (31) "These are the kind of men we have to fight," Leclerc noted in frustration.
A new pattern thus emerged in the second half of 1802: Black colonial troops would defect, prompting reprisals by the French, which in turn led to further defections. Leclerc believed Christophe and Dessalines were behind it all, that they were also playing the same double game Louverture had played by publicly backing the French while secretly working to undermine them.
He ordered their arrest, but couldn't get them in custody. They promptly defected and joined the opposition, bringing their armies with them. Whatever remote chance Leclerc had for victory was gone, though he could never admit that. What followed was a grinding retreat to inevitable defeat. The French embrace of terror as the war turned against them defined the second half of the struggle.
In October, Leclerc wrote to Napoleon that terror was now his only policy tool: "Here is my opinion on this country. We must destroy all the blacks of the mountains —men and women—and spare only children under twelve years of age. We must destroy half of those in the plains and must not leave a single colored person in the colony who has worn an epaulette." (32)
In other words, the only way to bring Saint-Domingue back to its pre-revolt economic glory was genocide. Once accomplished, they could import fresh slaves from Africa.
Another episode encapsulates the spiraling cycle of violence that was emerging at this stage of the conflict. After Christophe captured a group of Polish soldiers near Cap Français, he offered Leclerc a strange deal: release his beloved orchestra, which had been trapped in the town by the fighting, and he would return Leclerc's Poles unharmed. It seemed like a fair deal, especially for the sweating Poles. Leclerc refused, and so Christophe killed them all.
In response, Leclerc arrested his still-loyal black garrison in Cap Français, all 1,000 of them, and loaded them onto ships in the harbor. They had bags of flour tied to their necks before being pushed overboard to drown. The dead had a grisly revenge of sorts. Over the next few days, their bodies washed ashore onto steaming beaches outside of town, where they rotted under the equatorial sun "to the disgust and horror of the town's inhabitants." (33)
One French officer commented on the futility of such actions. This is how we are fighting the war," he noted before concluding: "The French will never be the masters of this country." (34) He was right, though his leadership was still under the delusion that terror could turn things around.
In November, Leclerc ordered the arrest of all remaining black troops still serving the French, assuming that if they weren't plotting to defect, they soon would be. That same month, Louverture's one-time commander of the north, Maurepas, and his family were tossed into the harbor and drowned. The same fate befell Louverture's son, Paul, and his family.
Still, there were some signs that Leclerc's conscience troubled him.
That month, he wrote in a letter to Napoleon, "Since I have been here, I have only seen the spectacle of fires, insurrections, murders, of the dead and dying."
He added, "My soul is withered, and no joyful thought can ever make me forget these hideous scenes." (35)
Poor Leclerc wouldn't need to wallow in self-pity for much longer.
By the end of November, he was dead from yellow fever.
V. War of Crimes: "I have avenged America!"
Leclerc's death put his second-in-command, General Rochambeau, in charge. He intensified the terror campaign in the coming months with malicious glee, long past any realistic chance of victory.
Rochambeau set the tone early by importing war dogs from Cuba. He organized a public demonstration in the courtyard of Cap Français's Government House to demonstrate what the dogs could do to human flesh. In front of a crowd of townspeople, a black prisoner was brought out to be ripped apart. However, the dogs showed little interest in the victim until his stomach was sliced open. (36) They then tore him apart for the ghoulish entertainment of the onlookers.
Rochambeau proved himself a moral monster over the coming months. According to C.L.R. James, under this command, "The French burned alive, hanged, drowned, tortured, and started again their old habit of burying blacks up to the neck near nests of insects. It was not only hatred and fear, but policy. (37) He even once held a party for some mixed-race women and then led them to a room where their dead husbands had been laid out. (38)
Still, the rebels had their own issues. Remember, Dessalines and Christophe had been fighting on the French side just a few months ago, and had done so with some enthusiasm. Many, like the black commander Sans-Souci, who had never switched sides, were reluctant to take orders from recent enemies. No matter. Christophe invited him to a meeting and then had him assassinated. (39)
Like I said, there are no heroes in this story, only villains and victims.
Despite this kind of violent infighting that would plague Haiti long after the Revolution, Dessalines, with Christophe's support, consolidated control of the insurgency and made steady gains, taking back all but a few ports, most notably Cap Français, where Rochambeau holed up with the remnants of his army.
In May 1803, Britain and France were once again at war. British ships soon appeared offshore, blockading Saint-Domingue and ending any last hope for supplies or reinforcements. Surrounded by Dessalines' troops, Rochambeau threw a surreal ball during those last twilight weeks before the end, signaling a bizarre finale to a century of French rule on the island.
In November, with defeat imminent, Rochambeau negotiated a surrender. The few thousand survivors from the original force sailed out of the harbor and were immediately taken prisoner by British ships waiting offshore. Thus ended one of France's greatest military debacles in its history (and that's saying something). In the end, over 50,000 French soldiers, sailors, and white colonists perished in less than two years of fighting, and had nothing to show for it. (40)
Now it was time for Dessalines to wage a vengeance campaign completely unopposed. Three days after Rochambeau evacuated Cap Français, he executed 800 prisoners who had been too ill to leave. (41) Worse was to come.
If Rochambeau and Leclerc had been bad, Dessalines would be no better. He was their black mirror. In the early months of 1804, Dessalines went from town to town to exterminate the remaining whites, including women and children. It was his own ethnic cleansing.
He justified the killings with this: "We have given these true cannibals war for war, crimes for crimes, outrages for outrages. Yes, I have saved my country, I have avenged America." (42)
VI. Final Thoughts - I am for the whites because I am white; I don't have any other reason. - Napoleon
With the French gone, Dessalines set to work consolidating his gains. He enshrined an end to slavery, established Haiti, and then declared himself emperor for life, a title he would hold for less than two years before being assassinated in 1806. Reviled at the time of his death for making himself a tyrant, an angry mob tore apart his corpse. (43)
Haiti's pattern of corrupt, autocratic governance had been set. The coming decades would bring division and civil war. The French were gone, the slaves were free, but the promise of freedom brought little improvement in the lives of most Haitians.
The Haitian Revolution was a cataclysm that reshaped the Atlantic world. Between 1791 and 1804, the enslaved of France's richest overseas territory rose up, defeated the armies of Europe's mightiest empires, and founded the first independent black republic. It was the only successful large-scale slave revolt in history.
Even so, the lesson for contemporaries was to reinforce racist stereotypes of black barbarity and cultural inferiority. One-sided tales of black atrocities haunted European and American minds. French atrocities went largely unmentioned.
American slave owners felt deep unease at the specter of rebelling slaves raping white women and exterminating white men. They viewed the Haitian example as an existential threat to their way of life, and they treated Haiti like a pariah state for years after it declared independence. The Haitian Revolution also rattled Virginia's white, slave-owning elites and influenced the passage of the 1806 manumission law, which made freeing slaves extremely difficult and forced those who were freed to leave the state within twelve months. (44)
Napoleon's loss of Saint-Domingue was a significant blow, and as a result, he abandoned French ambitions in the Americas. Napoleon's fiasco thus became an opportunity for the United States, as it paved the way for the Louisiana Purchase.
Though Napoleon was done with the New World, France was not. She refused to accept the loss of Saint-Domingue. Blocked out by the British fleet during the Napoleonic wars, displaced landowners plotted the day when they could get reparations. The Treaty of Vienna in 1815 reset the post-Napoleonic European order, including the recognition of France's claim to Saint-Domingue and its legitimate right to use force to reclaim it. France never went that far. Yet it found another way to suck Haiti of its wealth.
In 1825, a French flotilla showed up and demanded that the Haitians pay the staggering sum of 150 million francs in compensation for the losses incurred by plantation and slave owners. In return, France would recognize Haiti's independence, which would open the way for other nations to do the same. What it meant, however, was that impoverished former slaves and their descendants paid reparations to their rich former masters for decades after gaining their freedom (45).
It was extortion on a grand scale, plain and simple. Unfortunately, Haiti's rulers saw no other choice but to accept, thus saddling the country with a crippling debt not paid in full until 1883. Even then, debts on related loans continued until 1947. In the early twentieth century, French banks even managed the Haitian treasury, allowing them to plunder Haiti for the benefit of wealthy white shareholders. (46)
The Haitian Revolution represented an unprecedented victory against slavery and colonialism, yet one followed by generations of punishment from the very powers it had defied. Haiti showed the world that enslaved people could seize their own freedom and build a nation, but the cost was staggering, both in blood and in the crushing weight of international isolation and debt that echoes to the present, as Haiti finds itself among the poorest nations on the planet.
It's a reminder that the arc of history does not always bend toward progress for all.
Supplementary Materials
Endnotes
(1) Andrew Roberts. Napoleon: A Life, 300.
(2) Laurent Dubois. Avengers of the New World, 67.
(3) Jeremy Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution, 119.
(4) Dubois, 255.
(5) Popkin, 119.
(6) Dubois, 264.
(7) Ibid., 264-265.
(8) Ibid., 269.
(9) Ibid.
(10) Ibid., 273.
(11) Ibid., 274.
(12) James, 323.
(13) Dubois, 274.
(14) James, 326.
(15) Dubois, 275.
(16) Ibid.
(17) Popkin, 126.
(18) Ibid., 127.
(19) Dubois, 277.
(20) Ibid., 278.
(21) Popkin, 127.
(22) Dubois, 278.
(23) Roberts, 300.
(24) Popkin, 128.
(25) Dubois, 285.
(26) Ibid., 284.
(27) Ibid., 285-286.
(28) Ibid., 286.
(29) Ibid., 282.
(30) Ibid., 286.
(31) Ibid., 288.
(32) Ibid., 292.
(33) Ibid., 289.
(34) Ibid., 290.
(35) Ibid., 292.
(36) Ibid., 292-293.
(37) James, 358.
(38) Popkin, 134.
(39) Dubois, 294.
(40) Popkin, 135.
(41) Ibid., 137.
(42) Ibid.
(43) Ibid., 145.
(44) Wolf, 121-128.
(46) Popkin, 152-154.
Works Cited
Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World. H rvard University Press, 2004.
Investigating Haiti's 'Double Debt' (Published 2022), www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/insider/investigating-haitis-double-debt.html. Accessed 2 Oct. 2025.
James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins. Penguin Random House, 1963.
Popkin, Jeremy D.. A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2011. P oQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=7104627.
Roberts, Andrew. N poleon: A Life. V king, 2014, 300.
Wolf, Eva Sheppard. Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner's Rebellion. Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
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Paul Wilke
Dry Grove, IL
2 October 2025