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Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, produced about 60 percent of the world’s coffee and 40 percent of its sugar, and planters calculated it was cheaper to work enslaved Africans to death than to sustain them: at least half of new arrivals died within a year. About half a million enslaved people faced roughly 40,000 white colonists, held in check by a caste system that set grands blancs, petits blancs and free people of color against one another. In August 1791, after a secret religious ceremony held during a thunderstorm, tens of thousands rose up. Toussaint Louverture, a literate, formerly enslaved plantation manager in his late 40s who had read Guillaume Raynal’s prophecy of an avenger of the enslaved, emerged as the leading strategist.

He first fought with Spanish weapons, then switched to France when it abolished slavery in 1794, expelled the British and Spanish, and by 1801 ruled the colony under a constitution naming him governor for life. Napoleon sent Charles Leclerc with secret orders to restore slavery. Toussaint burned the capital, agreed to a truce in May 1802, and was seized and sent to Fort de Joux in the French Alps, where he died. Jean-Jacques Dessalines fought on, yellow fever killed Leclerc, and after victory at Vertières Haiti declared independence on January 1, 1804.

• Dessalines stood with a lit torch beside a powder magazine at Crête-à-Pierrot, vowing to blow up the fort rather than surrender.
• General Rochambeau suffocated prisoners with burning sulfur in ships’ holds and imported attack dogs.
• More than 200,000 Haitian lives were lost in the war.
• In 1825 France forced Haiti, under threat of blockade, to pay an indemnity to former planters.
• The loss of Saint-Domingue led Napoleon to sell the Louisiana territory to the United States.