Read the text on the right and then review the Documents below:

•	For a pictoral essay of the Haitian Revolution, see Image 1.
•	How did the French Revolution inspire revolt in Saint Domingue? For more on European inspirations for the revolt see Document 1.
•	How did other revolutionaries in the Atlantic World respond to the Haitian revolt? Use the following Documents for analyses. Why did many revolutionary leaders fear the Haitian example? Document 2, Document 3.
•	For the Haitian Revolution's impact on the United States, read the following analyses. What long run impact did the slave revolt and the founding of the second republic in the Western Hemisphere have on the people of the larger American republic? Document 4, Document 5.

Inspirations for Slave Rebellion on Haiti

The ideals of the French Revolution spread rapidly beyond France through the rest of Europe and even overseas. In few places did they produce a more radical effect than on the island of Saint Domingue, renamed Haiti after it acquired independence. By the 1780s, Saint Domingue was France’s richest colony and its most valuable overseas trading possession. Its wealth came from sugar plantations that depended on a vast, highly coerced slave population. About 40,000 whites ruled over and ruthlessly exploited 500,000 enslaved Africans, approximately two-thirds of whom had recently arrived from Africa. The lives of the slaves were short and brutal, lasting on average only fifteen years; hence the need for the wealthy planter class to replenish their labor supplies from Africa at frequent intervals. White planters from the island had the reputation of great wealth. Those who dressed ostentatiously as they strode the streets of Paris in the late eighteenth century were said to be as wealthy as a "creole," meaning a Caribbean planter. But the white planters also knew their privileges were vulnerable, which made them eager to amass quick fortunes so that they could sell out and return to France. These men and women were vastly outnumbered by the enslaved, who were seething with resentment, at a time when abolitionist sentiments were gaining ground in Europe and even circulating among the slaves in the Americas.

Yet, the planters greeted the onset of the French Revolution in 1789 with enthusiasm. They saw an opportunity to gain internal political power and to engage in wider trading contacts with North America and the rest of the world. They ignored, at their peril, the fact that the ideals of the French Revolution, and especially its slogan of liberty, equality, and fraternity, could inspire the island’s free blacks, free mulattoes, and slaves. Indeed, no sooner had the white planters thrown in their lot with the Third Estate in France than a slave rebellion broke out in their midst in Saint Domingue. From its inception in August 1791, it led, after great loss of life to African slave dissidents and French soldiers, to the proclamation of an independent state in Haiti in 1804, ruled by African Americans. Haiti became, in fact, the Americas’ second independent republican government.

The revolution had many sources of inspiration. It was both French and African. According to a later West Indian scholar, a group of black Jacobins, determined to carry the ideals of the French Revolution to their logical end point- the abolition of slavery-made up the revolutionary cadre. Their undisputed leader was a freed black by the name of Toussaint L’Ouverture, who had learned about the French abolitionist writings of the age. But it is hardly surprising, given how recently most of the slaves had arrived from Africa, that African cultural and political ideals also fomented slave resistance. At a secret forest meeting held on August 14, 1791, the persons who were to lead the initial stage of the revolution gathered to affirm their commitment to one another at a voodoo ritual, presided over by a tall, black priestess, "with strange eyes and bristly hair." Voodoo was a mixture of African and New World religious beliefs that existed among slave communities in many parts of the Americas (see Chapter 5). According to one description of the forest ceremony, the priestess arrived "armed with a long pointed knife that she waved above her head [as] she performed a sinister dance singing an African song, which the others, face down against the ground, repeated as a chorus. A black pig was then dragged in front of her, and she split it open with her knife. The animal’s blood was collected in a wooden bowl and served still foaming to each delegate. At a signal from the priestess, everyone threw themselves on their knees and swore blindly to obey the orders of Boukman, who had been proclaimed supreme chief of the rebellion." Boukman was a voodoo chief himself, and he initiated the revolution against the planters, though it was Toussaint L’Ouverture who later assumed leadership of the revolt.

Inspired by both voodoo and the French Revolution, the rebellion in Saint Domingue resulted in a series of dramatic ruptures. European slavery came to an end. White planters yielded to a black political elite. Hundreds of thousands of slaves and French soldiers perished or were maimed, and the old sugar export economy could no longer be sustained. No slave shipments arrived, and no sugar was exported.