Haiti was a brutal, terrifying place for most slaves.
Slavery was particularly harsh in Haiti, much harsher than in the USA. There were laws which defined what a slave owner could, and couldn't do to their slaves, but these were routinely ignored. 
There are at least two documented cases of runaway slaves being captured, tied over a log, a funnel put up their backside, gunpowder poured in and then a fuse lit - all for the benefit of the other slaves - they were killed by being blown apart as a warning to the others. 

The work was hard, life expectancy low and wives and children were routinely sold away from their husbands. The French even codified the degrees of "African-ness", down to 1 part per 128, that's someone's great-great-great-great-great-great grand parents, and what jobs and responsibilities they could have. 

Then there were the maroons - escaped slaves who lived in the jungles and mountains - they occasionally raided plantations and even the towns, killing whites and taking slaves away with them. The Maroons became like the bogeyman to blacks and whites alike. 

Then along comes the French Revolution, with it's promise of "Liberty, Fraternity and Equality", obviously the slaves believed that this meant them as well: it didn't. 

The intellectual cause of the Haitian Revolution was the philosophies of the Enlightenment - specifically the same intellectual base as the French Revolution. Basically the cry "libertie egalitie fraternitie" does not qualify which kind of person should be free - so ALL men were considered brothers. This thought pervaded Haitian mulatto and freed slave society, and seemed to offer a genuine equality and freedom for all on the island. 
The other intellectual driving force of the revolution is the individual intellect of those leaders who were able to motivate, to organise and to conduct military campaigns with skill and flair - the leaders, Christopher, Brenda and, of course, Toussaint L'Ouverture.

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3 years ago