Blacks Granted Full Rights in Saint Domingue

The French colony of Saint-Domingue contained a substantial population of free people of color, many of them property owners who nonetheless faced legal discrimination and were denied political rights enjoyed by white colonists. As the French Revolution unfolded, these free Blacks and mulattoes pressed the new authorities in Paris to extend the revolution's principles of equality to them.

In May 1791 the French National Assembly issued a decree granting political rights to certain free men of color born of free parents. The white colonists in the colony bitterly refused to implement the measure, and violence erupted, including the execution of the free coloured leader Vincent Oge the previous year, deepening the racial conflict across the colony.

The turmoil among free people and colonists soon merged with a far larger event, the great slave insurrection that began in the north of Saint-Domingue in August 1791. The fighting that followed cost thousands of lives on all sides and proved impossible to contain. It marked the opening stage of the Haitian Revolution, which culminated in the colony's independence as Haiti in 1804.