Torn between Toussaint Louverture and André Rigaud, Haiti’s War of Knives reveals a brutal struggle for power that reshaped revolution—what came next changed everything.

Daringly born in 1804 as the first Black republic, Haiti’s independence unsettled empires and still shapes freedom debates—what legacy did the world try to silence?

Just beneath Saint-Domingue’s sugar riches, mercantilist control, racial exclusion, and brutal slavery ignited forces that would soon overturn an empire—discover what happened next.

Witness Haiti’s hard-won independence from Saint-Domingue’s brutal slave empire, and discover the startling aftermath that reshaped global freedom struggles.

On January 1, 1804, in Gonaïves, Jean-Jacques Dessalines publicly proclaimed Haiti's independence from France. The declaration was drafted by his secretary, Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, and it framed independence as a permanent break backed by a collective vow to resist any return of French rule. (Encyclopedia Virginia, primary document) This page explains what the proclamation said, why…

Toussaint Louverture (circa 1743 to 1803) rose from enslavement in Saint-Domingue to become the revolution’s most powerful commander and, by 1801, the colony’s governor-general under a new constitution that banned slavery while keeping the plantation economy running. His greatest achievement was building enough military and political leverage to make emancipation irreversible in practice, even as…