Haitian Uprising: Enslaved People Rise Against France
The Bois Caiman ceremony on the night of August 14, 1791, was a Vodou ritual led by Dutty Boukman, an enslaved man from Jamaica, that served as the signal for a coordinated slave uprising across the northern plain of Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Within a week, over 1,000 plantations were burning and hundreds of slaveholders had been killed. The French colony was the most profitable in the Caribbean, producing 40% of the world's sugar and 60% of its coffee through the labor of roughly 500,000 enslaved people. The uprising launched the Haitian Revolution, a thirteen-year struggle that ended with Haitian independence in 1804, making it the only successful slave revolt in history and the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere.
August 21, 1791
235 years ago
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